We fear the future, and we fear the presentation of new ideas, now that we are all so well-trained in the art of deconstruction.

Well, most people go about it naively - ‘deconstruction’ (in its crit-theory sense) transformed into consumerist behaviour patterns within a decade, and ‘remix culture’ hasn’t exactly increased the thoughtfulness of the average reader’s engagement with the ‘meaning’ of material. ‘We’re eating ourselves’ has been a common thread in cultural criticism for a long time, of course (ever read ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ by Walter Benjamin? Extraordinary essay, nominally about its titular subject but diving into deep water by the end), and the early pomo theorists were preoccupied with the loss of the ‘grand narrative.’ You can get a little bit out of Debord, Baudrillard, Lyotard…but you don’t really need full-spectrum lit-crit background to catch their feeling.

The important counterweight to formal repetition, it seems, is emotional openness: if I recognize that my experience of The Princess Bride is not now what it was when I was ten - the Miracle Max schtick now reads as racially coded, the ‘true love wins’ ending seems more melancholy, Inigo’s revenge plan is pathetic/lucky rather than a good man’s destiny, etc. - then both experiences can cast light, and repetition isn’t terribly important in itself. As long as I give myself to the emotional logics the artist offers…

The Sopranos is a pastiche too, but the formal resonances between it and previous Mafia stories (particularly Goodfellas and the distant, sainted Godfather flicks) are meant to comment ironically on Tony’s life. That life is very real; it’s been rendered with care; and recognizing the fictional tactics doesn’t take away from the honesty and integrity of their execution. When people care about the stories they’re telling - which is to say, when people care about the people around them - you always know it. It always sings through, because we can spot a liar and feel comforted by people taking comfort in us.

In other words, don’t worry too much about ‘contemporary art.’ That insane categorization scheme exists only after the fact. Just listen to stories, and in your own stories, don’t lie. (Not to say ‘don’t fictionalize,’ which is unrelated.) Emotional connection isn’t graded on a curve.

But, in the intervening years, creativity became much more important, and the artist’s work was in inspiration, not in assembly. Joyce writes Ulysses around the skeleton of the Odyssey, but the import of it doesn’t lie mostly in that device. Prior to, say, thirty years ago, there’s nothing like a “remix”, or especially a “mash-up”, where the only creative work is in the surprising juxtaposition of two already well-established forms.

It’s possible that what we have in the modern world is really nothing new, but if so, it would really be surprising; the culture HAS changed. If the internet, the extreme democratization of media production via computers, the centrality of mass entertainment in public discourse, the motley diet of influences that our generation was raised on, had no influence on the way we produce art, I would be very shocked.

I’ll admit that my thesis is inadequately buttressed - many other possibilities exist: maybe we’re merely mythologizing the tidbits that made up our youth by turning them into symbols and elements. Or maybe the idea of ‘taste’ or merit has deteriorated, and therefore creativity gets lost amidst the doldrums of lazy work. And I don’t mean to be categorical, here, and suggest that there’s no such thing as original work in modern times, that all art is pastiche-work.

But I think we ought to be able to find a strong influence of the nihilism of our times on art, and I DO think the use of pastiche necessarily implies a fear of creating anew. There’s probably also something to be said for the increasing intrusion of criticism into the creative process, I’m not sure what.

All of this makes me wish I had studied some kind of literary theory so I would be better versed in the tools and language required to perform this kind of critique.

(On the other hand, kids today really are different.)