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   #[1]alternate [2]Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill

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Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill

   A Times critic argues that ours is the least innovative century for the
   arts in 500 years. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

   Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven

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   [12]Jason Farago

   By [13]Jason Farago
     * Oct. 10, 2023

   At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in its fall blockbuster show,
   [14]“Manet/Degas,” is a painting from 1866 of a woman in the latest
   fashion. Victorine Meurent, Manet’s favorite model, stands in an empty
   room, accompanied only by a parrot on a bird stand. Her trademark red
   hair is tied back with a blue ribbon. Her head is slightly bowed as she
   smells a nosegay in her right hand: probably a gift from an absent
   admirer, just like the gentleman’s monocle in her left. She’s wearing a
   silk peignoir, which Manet has rendered in buttery strokes of pink and
   white. This is a full-length image, more than six feet tall, but
   Victorine hasn’t even put on her best clothes. She’s in a dressing
   gown, and the gown is amorphous. The gown is only paint.

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   Manet called this painting “Young Lady in 1866,” and the title is the
   briefest manifesto I know. After ages in which artists aimed for
   timelessness, Manet pictured a woman living in 1866, in the Paris of
   1866, wearing clothes from 1866. The painting was a radical eruption of
   temporal specificity. An art for this year, in this place, in a form
   possible only now.

   Image “Young Lady in 1866”
   “Young Lady in 1866,” by Edouard Manet.Credit...Metropolitan Museum of
   Art

   Most artists and audiences at the time did not think this was such a
   virtue. “Young Lady in 1866” got bad press at the Salon, the annual
   exhibition of France’s official art academy, where artists aspired to
   eternal beauty and eternal values, expressed through classicized motifs
   and highly finished surfaces. Thomas Couture, Manet’s own teacher,
   specialized in bloated but very technically proficient tableaux of
   nymphs and heroes. Only a few Parisians could see, in the thick pallor
   of Victorine’s face and the impetuous brushiness of her peignoir, the
   mark of a new cultural dispensation. Baudelaire, Manet’s great friend,
   articulated it in “The Flowers of Evil”:

     O Death, old captain, it’s time! Lift anchor!
     We’re sick of this country, Death! Let us sail ...
     To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!

   To find something new! That was the imperative of modernism, not only
   in painting but also in poetry, in theater, in music, in architecture
   and eventually in the cinema. Your job as an artist was no longer to
   glorify the king or the church, nor to imitate as faithfully as
   possible the appearance of the outside world. It was to solder the next
   link in a cultural chain — fashioning a novel utterance that took novel
   shape even as it manifested its place in a larger history. “You have to
   be absolutely modern,” Rimbaud declared; “Make it new,” Ezra Pound
   instructed. To speak to your time, we once believed, required much more
   than new “content.” It required a commitment to new modes of narration,
   new styles of expression, that could bear witness to sea changes in
   society.

   Manet, classically trained, figured out quickly that if he painted
   scenes of Parisian prostitutes in the same manner as his teacher
   painted Roman orgiasts, that wouldn’t cut it; he would have to invent a
   new kind of painting — flatter, franker — if he wanted to capture
   modern life. From then on, the creators who most decisively marked the
   history of art, again and again, described their work as a search for a
   new language, a new style, a new way of being. “I have transformed
   myself in the zero of form,” Kazimir Malevich wrote in 1915, and in his
   black square he found “the face of the new art.” Le Corbusier insisted
   that his open floor plans, enabled by reinforced floating columns, were
   not just an architectural aesthetic but an age: “Nothing is left to us
   of the architecture of past epochs, just as we can no longer derive any
   benefit from the literary and historical teaching given in schools.”
   Aimé Césaire, who would revolutionize French poetry in the 20th century
   as Baudelaire did in the 19th, understood that a modern Black
   expression required “a new language, capable of expressing an African
   heritage.” “In other words,” he said, “French was for me an instrument
   that I wanted to twist into a new way of speaking.”

   For 160 years, we spoke about culture as something active, something
   with velocity, something in continuous forward motion. What happens to
   a culture when it loses that velocity, or even slows to a halt? Walking
   through the other galleries of the Met after my third visit to
   “Manet/Degas,” I started doing that thing all the Salon visitors used
   to do in Paris in 1866: ignoring the paintings and scoping out the
   other spectators’ clothes. I saw visitors in the skinny jeans that
   defined the 2000s and in the roomy, high-waisted jeans that were
   popular in the 1990s; neither style looked particularly au courant or
   dated. Manet was a fashion maven, and I’d been marveling anew at the
   gauzy white-striped gown with flared sleeves that Berthe Morisot wears
   in [15]“The Balcony” to signal that she is a contemporary woman — that
   she is alive right now. What piece of clothing or accessory could you
   give a model to mark her as “Young Lady in 2023”? A titanium-cased
   iPhone is all that comes to mind, and even that hasn’t changed its
   appearance much in a decade.

   To audiences in the 20th century, novelty seemed to be a cultural
   birthright. Susan Sontag could write in 1965, with breezy confidence,
   that new styles of art, cinema, music and dance “succeed one another so
   rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to
   prepare.” Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s
   far less capable of change. Intellectual property has swallowed the
   cinema; the Hollywood studios that once proposed a slate of big, medium
   and small pictures have hedged their bets, and even independent
   directors have stuck with narrative and visual techniques born in the
   1960s. Have you tried to furnish an apartment lately? Whether you are
   at Restoration Hardware or on Alibaba, what you are probably buying are
   replicas of European antiques: “contemporary” designs first seen in
   Milan in the 1970s or Weimar in the 1920s. Harry Styles is rocking in
   the ’80s; Silk Sonic is jamming in the ’70s; somehow “Frasier” has been
   revived and they barely had to update the wardrobes.

   If the present state of culture feels directionless — it does to me,
   and sussing out its direction is literally my job — that is principally
   because we are still inculcated, so unconsciously we never even bother
   to spell it out, in what the modernists believed: that good art is good
   because it is innovative, and that an ambitious writer, composer,
   director or choreographer should not make things too much like what
   others have made before. But our culture has not been able to deliver
   step changes for quite some time. When you walk through your local
   museum’s modern wing, starting with Impressionism and following a
   succession of avant-gardes through the development of Cubism, Dada,
   Pop, minimalism, in the 1990s you arrive in a forest called “the
   contemporary,” and after more than 30 years no path forward has been
   revealed. On your drive home, you can turn on the decade-by-decade
   stations of Sirius XM: the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s will each
   sound distinct, but all the millennial nostalgia of the 2000s station
   cannot disguise that “We Belong Together” and “Irreplaceable” do not
   yet sound retro. When I was younger, I looked at cultural works as if
   they were posts on a timeline, moving forward from Manet year by year.
   Now I find myself adrift in an eddy of cultural signs, where everything
   just floats, and I can only tell time on my phone.

   Image
   Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven

   We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go
   down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least
   pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing
   press. There is new content, of course, so much content, and there are
   new themes; there are new methods of production and distribution, more
   diverse creators and more global audiences; there is more singing in
   hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV detectives with
   smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years in,
   though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a
   handful of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have
   been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical
   standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture
   in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling
   through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The
   suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and
   place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.

   To any claim that cultural progress is “over,” there is an easy and not
   inaccurate retort: Well, what about X? And sure enough, our time has
   indeed brought forth wonderful, meaningful cultural endeavors. I find
   the sculptures of [16]Nairy Baghramian, the [17]videos of Stan Douglas
   and the [18]environments of Pierre Huyghe to be artistic achievements
   of the highest caliber; I think [19]Ali Smith is writing novels of
   tremendous immediacy; I believe [20]“Transit” and [21]“Drive My Car”
   reaffirm the vitality of cinema; I love [22]South African amapiano and
   [23]Korean soap operas and [24]Ukrainian electronic music. My own
   cultural life is very rich, and this is not some rant that once
   everyone was so creative and now they’re all poseurs. I am asking a
   different and peskier question: why cultural production no longer
   progresses in time as it once did.

   I have a few theories, but one to start with is that the modernist
   cultural explosion might very well have been like the growth of the
   economy more generally: not the perpetual forward march we were
   promised in the 20th century, but a one-time-only rocket blast followed
   by a long, slow, disappointing glide. As the economist Robert Gordon
   has shown, the transformative growth of the period between 1870 and
   1970 — the “special century,” he calls it — was an anomalous superevent
   fueled by unique and unrepeatable innovations (electricity, sanitation,
   the combustion engine) whose successors (above all information
   technology) have not had the same economic impact. In the United
   States, the 2010s had the slowest productivity growth of any decade in
   recorded history; if you believe you are living in the future, I am
   guessing you have not recently been on United Airlines. In this
   macroeconomic reading, a culture that no longer delivers expected
   stylistic innovations might just be part and parcel of a more generally
   underachieving century, and not to be tutted at in isolation.

   But more than the economics, the key factor can only be what happened
   to us at the start of this century: first, the plunge through our
   screens into an infinity of information; soon after, our submission to
   algorithmic recommendation engines and the surveillance that powers
   them. The digital tools we embraced were heralded as catalysts of
   cultural progress, but they produced such chronological confusion that
   progress itself made no sense. “It’s still one Earth,” the novelist
   Stacey D’Erasmo wrote in 2014, “but it is now subtended by a layer of
   highly elastic non-time, wild time, that is akin to a global collective
   unconscious wherein past, present and future occupy one unmediated
   plane.” In this dark wood, today and yesterday become hard to
   distinguish. The years are only time stamps. Objects lose their
   dimensions. Everything is recorded, nothing is remembered; culture is a
   thing to nibble at, to graze on.

   If there is one cultural work that epitomizes this shift, where you can
   see our new epoch coming into view, I want to say it’s [25]“Back to
   Black,” by Amy Winehouse. The album dates to October 2006 — seven
   months after Twitter was founded, three months before the iPhone
   debuted — and it seems, listening again now, to be closing the door on
   the cultural system that Manet and Baudelaire established a century and
   a half previously. As the millennium dawned, there had been various
   efforts to write the symphony of the future (the last of which was
   probably Missy Elliott’s “Da Real World,” a “Matrix”-inspired album
   from 1999 that promised to sound like “not the year 2G but the year
   3G”). There had also been various retroprojections, trying to
   inaugurate a new century with pre-Woodstock throwbacks (waxed
   mustaches, speakeasies; perhaps you recall an embarrassing circa-2000
   vogue for swing dancing).

   Image
   Amy Winehouse at the Highline Ballroom in New York in
   2007.Credit...Michael Nagle for The New York Times

   “Back to Black” was the first major cultural work of the 21st century
   that was neither new nor retro — but rather contented itself to float
   in time, to sound as if it came from no particular era. Winehouse wore
   her hair in a beehive, her band wore fedoras, but she was not
   performing a tribute act of any kind. Her production drew from the
   Great American Songbook, ’60s girl groups, also reggae and ska, but it
   never felt anachronistic or like a “postmodern” pastiche. Listen again
   to the title track and its percussive piano line: a stationary,
   metronomic cycle of D minor, G minor, B-flat major, and A7. The bass
   line of the piano overlays the chords with a syncopated swing, while a
   tambourine slaps and jangles with joyless regularity. We are back to
   Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, we are waiting for the Shangri-Las or the
   Ronettes to come in, but instead Winehouse delivers a much more ragged
   and minor-keyed performance, with a vulgarity in the song’s second line
   that Martha Reeves would never pronounce. There is a discrepancy
   between vocals and instrumentation that is never resolved, and the
   artistry is all in that irresolution.

Who cares if it’s novel as long as it’s beautiful, or meaningful?

   What Winehouse prefigured was a culture of an eternal present: a
   digitally informed sense of placelessness and atemporality that has
   left so many of us disoriented from our earlier cultural signposts.
   Each song on “Back to Black” seemed to be “borrowing from all the last
   century’s music history at once,” as the media scholar Moira Weigel
   once observed, though there was something contemporary about that
   timelessness too. Extracted from the past into lightweight MP3s, all
   the girl-group and jazz prefigurations began to seem just as immediate
   as Winehouse’s North London present.

   As early as 2006, well before the reverse chronology of blogs and the
   early Facebook gave way to the algorithmic soup of Instagram, Spotify
   and TikTok, Winehouse sensed that the real digital revolution in
   culture would not be in production, in the machines that artists used
   to make music or movies or books. It would be in reception: on the
   screens where they (where we) encountered culture, on which past and
   present are equidistant from each other. One upshot of this digital
   equation of past and present has been a greater disposability of
   culture: an infinite scroll and nothing to read, an infinite Netflix
   library with nothing to watch. Though pop music still throws up new
   stars now and then (I do really like [26]Ice Spice), the market for new
   music fell behind older music in the middle of the last decade, and
   even the records that sell, or stream, cannot be said to have wide
   cultural impact. (The most popular single of 2022 in the United States
   was [27]“Heat Waves,” a TikTok tune by a British alternative-pop group
   with little public profile called Glass Animals; and what’s weirdest is
   that it was recorded in 2020.)

   Outside of time there can be no progress, only the perpetual trying-on
   of styles and forms. Here years become vibes — or “eras,” as Taylor
   Swift likes to call them. And if culture is just a series of trends,
   then it is pointless to worry about their contemporaneity. There was a
   charming freakout last year when Kate Bush’s 1985 single “Running Up
   That Hill” went to the top of the charts after its deployment on yet
   another nostalgic television show, and veterans of the big-hair decade
   were horrified to see it appear on some 2022 playlists alongside Dua
   Lipa and the like. If you think the song belongs to 1985 in the way
   “Young Lady in 1866” belonged to 1866, the joke is now officially on
   you.

   Down at the baseline where cultural innovation used to happen, in the
   forms that artists once put together to show us something new — in the
   sounds of the recording studio, the shapes on the canvas, the movements
   of the dancers, the arrangements of the verse — something has stopped,
   or at least slowed to such a lethargic pace as to feel stopped. Such a
   claim may sound familiar if you were around for the postmodernism
   debates of the 1980s. The philosopher Arthur Danto averred that art
   ended with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, while the literary critic
   Fredric Jameson declared in 1984 that the whole of modernity was “spent
   and exhausted,” that there was no more style, indeed no more self, and
   that “the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past:
   the imitation of dead styles.” As for the influence of digital media,
   as early as 1989 the cultural theorist Paul Virilio identified a “polar
   inertia” — a static pileup of images and words with no particular place
   to go — as the inevitable endpoint for culture on a “weightless planet”
   constituted of ones and zeros.

   And yet looking back now, the “postmodern” turn of the later 20th
   century looks much more like a continuation of the modernist commitment
   to novelty than a repudiation of it. John Cage’s noteless composition
   “4'33"” was no last music, but flowered into the impostures of Fluxus
   and the ambient experiments of Brian Eno. The buildings of Frank Gehry
   and Zaha Hadid did look like nothing that came before, thanks in part
   to new rendering and fabrication technologies (CAD software, laser
   cutting machines). The digitally produced music of Massive Attack and
   even, I hate to say it, Moby did sound different from what was on the
   radio 10 years before. No one style could be called the true vanguard
   anymore, sure — but that did not preclude the perpetual discovery of
   new ones. The forecast at the end of the 20th century was a plurality
   of new images and sounds and words, powered perhaps by new, heavy
   desktop production machines.

   Since the start of the 21st century, despite all recent digital
   accelerations of discovery and transmission, no stylistic innovations
   of equivalent scale have taken place. The closest thing we can point to
   has been in rap, where the staccato nihilism of drill, deeply
   conversant with YouTube and SoundCloud, would sound legitimately
   foreign to a listener from 2000. (When the teenage Chief Keef was
   rapping in his grandmother’s Chicago apartment, he was following in the
   tradition of Joyce and Woolf and Pound.) In fact, the sampling
   techniques pioneered in hip-hop and, later, electronic dance music —
   once done with piles of records, now with folders of WAV files — have
   trickled down into photography, painting, literature and lower forms
   like memes, all of which now present a hyperreferentialism that sets
   them slightly apart from the last century’s efforts. In the 2010s,
   hip-hop alone seemed to be taking the challenge of digital progress
   seriously, though it, too, has calcified since; having switched from
   linear writing and recording of verses to improvising hundreds of
   one-verse digital takes, rappers now seem to be converging on a single,
   ProTools-produced flow.

   There have also been a few movies of limited influence (and very
   limited box-office success) that have introduced new cinematographic
   techniques: Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (2016) was the
   first film shot at an eerily lifelike 120 frames per second, while at
   the other extreme, Steven Soderbergh shot all of “Unsane” (2018) with
   an iPhone 7 Plus. Michael Bay’s “Ambulance” (2022) included
   first-person-view drone shots, flying the viewer through the windows of
   exploding cars the way your dad shot your last beach-vacation memory
   reel. But by and large the technologies that have changed filmmaking
   since 2000 have stayed in the postproduction studio: computer-graphics
   engines, digital tools for color grading and sound editing. They have
   had vanishingly little influence on the grammar of the moving image, in
   the way that lightweight cameras did for the Nouvelle Vague or digital
   kits did for American indie cinema. Really, the kind of image that
   distinguishes this century is less the spectacular Hollywood image than
   what the German artist Hito Steyerl has called the “poor image” —
   low-res compressed pictures like memes, thumbnails, screenshots — whose
   meaning arises from being circulated and modified.

   It may just be that the lexical possibilities of many traditional media
   are exhausted, and there’s no shame in that. Maybe Griffith and
   Eisenstein and Godard and Akerman did it all already, and it’s foolish
   to expect a new kind of cinema. Certainly that exhaustion came long ago
   to abstract painting, where every possible move can only be understood
   as a quotation or reboot. (Kerstin Brätsch, one of the smartest
   abstract painters working today, has acknowledged that any mark she
   makes is “not empty anymore but loaded with historical reference.”)
   Consider last year’s hit “Creepin’,” by The Weeknd: a 2022 rejigger of
   the 2004 Mario Winans song “I Don’t Wanna Know” with no meaningful
   change in instrumentation in the nearly two intervening decades. It was
   hardly the only recent chart-topper to employ a clangingly obvious
   sample, but it’s not like the endeavors of the 1990s, when Puffy and
   family were rapping over “Every Breath You Take.” Back then the critic
   Greg Tate could still celebrate such sampling as a motor of cultural
   progress; by “collapsing all eras of Black music onto a chip,” a new
   generation had new tools to write a new chapter of sound. Twenty-five
   years later, the citation and rearrangement have become so automatic as
   to seem automated — as our recent fears about artificial intelligence
   and large language models suggest we already know.

   Trapped on a modernist game board where there are no more moves to
   make, a growing number of young artists essentially pivoted to
   political activism — plant a tree and call it a sculpture — while
   others leaned hard into absurdity to try to express the sense of
   digital disorientation. You saw this Dadaist strategy in the hyperpop
   of 100 gecs, in the crashed-and-burned “post-internet” art of the
   collective Dis, and above all in the satirical fashion of Virgil Abloh.
   (Abloh, who died in 2021, was outspoken about how comedy functioned as
   a coping mechanism for a generation lost in a digital fog: “It’s not a
   coincidence that things have gravitated toward this invented language
   of humor,” he said in 2018. “But then I often wonder: Is streetwear
   hollow?”)

   It wouldn’t be so bad if we could just own our static position; who
   cares if it’s novel as long as it’s beautiful, or meaningful? But that
   pesky modernist conviction remains in us: A work of art demonstrates
   its value through its freshness. So we have shifted our expectations
   from new forms to new subject matter — new stories, told in the same
   old languages as before. In the 20th century we were taught that
   cleaving “style” from “content” was a fallacy, but in the 21st century
   content (that word!) has had its ultimate vengeance, as the sole
   component of culture that our machines can fully understand, transmit
   and monetize. What cannot be categorized cannot be streamed; to pass
   through the pipes art must become information. So, sure, there are new
   songs about texting and ghosting; sure, there are superhero movies
   about trauma and comedies about climate change. But in privileging the
   parts of culture that can be summarized and shared — the narratives,
   the characters, the lyrics, the lessons — digital media have bulldozed
   an autonomous sphere of culture into a moral terrain that Aristotle
   would find familiar: We again want our “content” to authentically
   reflect the world (mimesis) and produce healthy feelings in its
   consumers (catharsis).

   Very unfortunately, this evangelical turn in the arts in the 21st
   century has been conflated with the long-overdue admission of women,
   people of color and out sexual minorities into the culture industry —
   conflated, not least, by its P.R. departments. A gay rom-com is trotted
   out as “the first”; a Black Little Mermaid is a “breakthrough”; our
   museums, studios and publishing houses can bring nothing new to market
   except the very people they once systematically excluded. If resisting
   such market essentialism was once a primordial task of the artist — “I
   am not burying myself in a narrow particularism,” Césaire made clear in
   1956 as he forged a French poetry that could span the Black Atlantic —
   today identities keep being diminished, brutally, into a series of
   searchable tags.

   This institutional hunger for novelty combined with digital
   requirements for communicability may help explain why so much recently
   celebrated American culture has taken such conservative, traditionalist
   forms: oil portraiture, Iowa-vintage coming-of-age novels, biopics,
   operettas barely distinguishable from musical theater. “It scandalizes
   progressive sensibility to think that things were so much more complex
   in this domain a generation ago than they are now, but there you have
   it,” said Darby English, the art historian and author of “How To See a
   Work of Art in Total Darkness,” when asked in 2021 about the recent
   efflorescence of Black American art in museums and the market. “Because
   the core project is communication,” English said, “anything that
   resists the art-communications apparatus fails to leave a mark. Form
   has become increasingly irrelevant during these 20 years.”

   Image
   Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven

   There is no inherent reason — no reason; this point needs to be clear —
   that a recession of novelty has to mean a recession of cultural worth.
   On the contrary, non-novel excellence has been the state of things for
   a vast majority of art history. Roman art and literature provides a
   centuries-long tradition of emulation, appropriating and adapting
   Greek, Etruscan and on occasion Asian examples into a culture in which
   the idea of copying was alien. Medieval icons were never understood to
   be “of their time,” but looked back to the time of the Incarnation,
   forward to eternity or out of time entirely into a realm beyond human
   life. Even beyond the halfway point of the last millennium, European
   artists regularly emended, updated or substituted pre-existing artworks
   at will, integrating present and past into a more spiritually
   efficacious whole.

   Consider also the long and bountiful history of Chinese painting, in
   which, from the 13th century to the early 20th, scholar-artists
   frequently demonstrated their erudition by painting in explicit homage
   to masters from the past. For these literati painters, what mattered
   more than technical skill or aesthetic progression was an artist’s
   spontaneous creativity as channeled through previous masterpieces.
   There’s a painting I love in the Palace Museum in Beijing by Zhao
   Mengfu, a prince and scholar working during the Yuan dynasty, that
   dates to around 1310 but incorporates styles from several other
   periods. Spartan trees, whose branches hook like crab claws, derive
   from Song examples a few centuries earlier. A clump of bamboo in the
   corner coheres through strict, tight brushwork pioneered by the Han
   dynasty a thousand years before. Alongside the trees and rocks the
   artist added an inscription:

     The rocks are like flying-white, the trees are like seal script,
     The writing of bamboo draws upon the bafen method.
     Only when one masters this secret
     Will he understand that calligraphy and painting have always been
     one.

   In other words: Use one style of brushwork for one element, another for
   another, just as a calligrapher uses different styles for different
   purposes. But beyond the simple equation of writing and painting, Zhao
   was doing something much more important: He was sublimating styles,
   some from the recent past and some of great antiquity, into a series of
   recombinatory elements that an artist of his time could deploy in
   concert. The literati painters learned from the old masters (important
   during the Yuan dynasty, to safeguard the place of Han culture under
   Mongol rule), but theirs was no simple classicism. It was a practice of
   aesthetic self-fulfillment that channeled itself through pre-existing
   gestures. Without ever worrying about novelty, you could still speak
   directly to your time. You could express your tenderest feelings, or
   face up to the upheavals of your age, in the overlapping styles of
   artists long dead.

   Image
   “Elegant Rocks and Sparse Trees,” by Zhao Mengfu, circa
   1310.Credit...Palace Museum, Beijing

   Someone foresaw, profoundly, that this century was going to require
   something similar: that when forward motion became impossible,
   ambitious culture was going to have to take another shape. Winehouse,
   as producers and collaborators have reminded us since her death, was an
   inveterate collector and compiler of musical clips. (The drummer and
   music historian Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, remembered:
   “She would always be on her computer sending me MP3s: ‘Listen to this,
   listen to this. ... ’”) She was living through, and channeling into
   “Back to Black,” the initial dissolution of history into streams of
   digital information, disembodied, disintermediated, each no further
   from the present than a Google prompt. She freely recombined those
   fragments but never indulged in nostalgia; she was disappointed by the
   present but knew there was no going back. And at enormous personal
   cost, she created something enduring out of it, showing how much harder
   it would be to leave a real mark amid fathomless data — to transcend
   mere recombination, sampling, pastiche.

   If the arts are to matter in the 21st century, we must still believe
   that they can collectively manifest our lives and feelings: that they
   can constitute a Geistgeschichte, or “history of spirit,” as the German
   idealists used to say. This was entirely possible before modernism, and
   it is possible after. The most ambitious abstract painters working
   today, like Albert Oehlen and Charline von Heyl, are doing something
   akin to Winehouse’s free articulation: drawing from diverse and even
   contradictory styles in the hunt for forms that can still have effects.
   Olga Tokarczuk structured her 2007 book, “Flights,” as a constellation
   of barely connected characters and styles, more fugitive than the last
   century’s novels in fragments; to read her is less like looking at a
   mosaic than toggling among tabs. Bad Bunny, working at the crossroads
   of trap, reggaeton, bachata and rock, is crafting pick-and-mix
   aggregations of small pieces, like “Back to Black,” that are digital in
   every way that matters. All of them are speaking out of parts of the
   past in a language that is their own.

   We have every ability to live in a culture of beauty, insight,
   surprise, if we could just accept that we are no longer modern, and
   have not been for a while; that somewhere in the push and pull of
   digital homogeneity and political stasis we entered a new phase of
   history. We have been evading our predicament with coping mechanisms
   and marketing scams, which have left all of us disappointedly asking,
   What’s new? Surely it would be healthier — and who knows what might
   flower — if we accepted and even embraced the end of stylistic
   progress, and at last took seriously the digital present we are
   disavowing. And the perpetuity of “Back to Black,” still playing in the
   background of avocado-toast dispensaries in East London and West
   Hollywood after 17 years, suggests to me that we have not lost our
   ability to identify voices of our time, even if they are fated to speak
   a language yoked to the past. Culture is stuck? Progress is dead? I
   died a hundred times, a poet once said, and kept singing.

   [28]Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and
   culture in the U.S. and abroad. [29]More about Jason Farago
   A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 38 of the Sunday
   Magazine with the headline: Out of Time. [30]Order Reprints |
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