(cross-post from Facebook)
Serious question: Have I been the only person reading this whose
taste in art, film and literature for the most part actually has gotten
more old-fashioned instead of more contemporary as I get older?
Keep in mind that I used to read very little fiction from before WW1 or
so, and watch very few movies from before the 1970s... because that's
where the biggest stylistic paradigm shifts so far happened in each
medium. As a result, novels and films/TV series from before then often
felt like an alien language for me. Maybe it's because I've acquired a
more academic approach to art with a greater degree of historical
consciousness, but I realized there's so many influential works I'm not
familiar with so I've been doing a lot of catching up to do... so there
might be quite a few cultural nods to influences in favourite novels and
films I've never noticed. Another reason is that I've noticed that so
many common approaches to avantgarde/deconstruction/transgressive art
have become well-established traditions by now, so they might have
maintained their potential to yield works that could be satisfying on an
aesthetic level it remains debatable how radical they still are.
(Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism etc)
The strange thing is that it's the opposite way for me with music, I
think that within the last couple years I finally feel like I'm
constantly keeping tabs with what's going on right now in the music
genres I find most interesting. This might have to do with me listening
to more different genres than ever, and making more of an effort to
discuss music with people in real life than I have since 2011 or so. I
guess it does not exactly help my case that I almost rarely if ever
still blindly pick up (be it a book or a film or a music recording)
something because I like the cover art or think the description on the
back looks interesting, almost all the new stuff I get into I know
either from its historical importance or because someone else
recommended it to me...
------------- "The past is not some static being, it is not a previous present, nor a present that has passed away; the past has its own dynamic being which is constantly renewed and renewing." - Claire Colebrook
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