Built-in obsolescence

Over the past few years, I've been slowly developing a theory of what I call built-in obsolescence in art. It's still far from fully formed, but in a nutshell it says that all art becomes obsolete eventually, and that there's something to be said for art which not only accepts, but actually celebrates and depends on the fact that, at some maybe not-so-distant point in the future, it will have lost its original aesthetic content.

Of course, art can be repurposed over time. Most African tribal sculpture in the west is collected and admired for distinctly different reasons than those for which it was originally made. And probably not one visitor in a thousand has the ability to read the average cathedral's stained-glass windows in the manner in which their designers intended. So art can still be great, even after it has fallen into obsolescence.

What I've always had a soft spot for, however, is art which deliberately plays off evanescent cultural touchstones. Andy Warhol's portraits of B- and C-list celebs already have lost all but their purely formal power: we no longer know or care who these people are. Warhol, however, was on more solid ground when he took as subjects people who really changed the culture: in celebrating Elvis or Marilyn, he also memorialised them and helped their memory live on, in much the same way as Picasso did with Guernica.

Brett Easton Ellis's Glamorama, however, is a different kettle of fish. It was published in January 1999, and featured lists upon lists of the hottest models of the week, the coolest bars of the month. It was out of date within six months, and I remember thinking at the time that it would probably be incomprehensible within a couple of years. (It's certainly well past its sell-by date: the hardcover is 97,136th on the Amazon.com bestseller list, despite being 72% reduced to just $6.99.) I loved it, though, precisely because of its very deciduousness: loved it the way we love the cherry-blossom all the more in the knowledge that it will soon be gone.

Last weekend, however, I read Turn of the Century, by Kurt Andersen. It came out just four months after Glamorama, and sought to capture the feverish dot-com millenarianism of New York City in a future one year away. It, too, is now on the scrap-heap of literary history: a new hardback can be bought on Amazon for $2.54, while a used one goes for 84 cents. I bought mine from the New York Public Library, which had no more use for it, for a buck.

For the first couple of hundred pages of this supposedly out-of-date book, however, I was laughing out loud most of the time. Even now, long after we're all meant to have moved on from such things, it's an incredibly funny satire of what New York was like only a couple of years ago. Andersen's skewers are just as sharp as always, but now we see them puncture their targets through a tincture of, if not nostalgia, at least a certain wry remembrance of how things were.

It's almost as if a good artist can't help but make timeless art, even if he's trying not to. Scenes from Glamorama still stay with me, vividly: the book has had an ironically lasting effect for such a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon.

I'm not saying that Turn of the Century is great art. There's a very long middle section with lots of pointless plot, and the satire of the financial world isn't half as cutting as that of the meejah lifestyle in general. But all the same, it's worth exploring those books you bought a few years ago and never got around to reading: they're probably just as good now as they were then. Maybe even better.

Posted by Felix at 11:57 EST