Nostalgia
Despite the widely-held belief that today’s culture changes quickly, the opposite might be true. US pop culture has changed surprisingly little over the past fifty years. Try the following thought experiment: what did art (film, fashion, literature) from 1910 look like in 1960? Dated, out of place. But what does art from 1960 look like today? Cool, contemporary, still relevant.
We’ve continued emulating a great deal of the 1960s (and even the 1950s) in our clothing, music, writing, filmmaking, and other visual arts. My pet hypothesis is that, mass media—in particular film, television, and magazines—is keeping us more in contact with the 1960s than folks then were with the ‘10s. Today, the past tends to stick around more.
- A.D. Jameson, “A Dozen Dominants: The Current State Of US Indy Lit” [via]
