There's Nothing Staler Than Yesterday's Future

There's nothing more corny than a previous era's mind-blowing modernism.

A can of Campbell's soup on a fine art canvas in a fancy gallery is now the opposite of provocative. It's far more corny than a still life or nighttime cityscape - forms that have drearily existed for centuries.

Same for a sax player honking atonally, freed from the chains of tempo and harmony. After four notes, everyone consciously or unconsciously says "Ok, that." A shtick. Again, the opposite of mind-blowing. The very epitome of corniness.

Conservative painters who keep doing figurative work, respecting traditional confines of frame and the whole brush/paint/canvas rigmarole, might present subtle originality which might be parsable generations hence. But while the modernist gambit of smashing form seems rawly provocative in the moment, it never holds up. The last thing modernists want is to ever seem stale, but that's the inevitable fate of form-smashing gestures. After the fourth or fifth iteration, it becomes "Ok, that." A shtick.

There's nothing staler than yesterday's avant-garde.

I hope I haven't made that seem too reasonable, because it's actually a pretty fresh and counterintuitive observation. Though it may not seem so in the future, if this view ever becomes more widely accepted. If so, it will seem dully obvious. Radical freshness of any sort - not just avant garde art - always carries an expiration date.

There's nothing more passé than yesterday's future. Flintstones reruns still leave 'em laughing while The Jetsons now seem archaic (even though we still don't have flying cars). And nothing screams "The Old Days" more than boldly futuristic automotive tail fins, much as I love them.

I've mentioned this before, but in the mid 1990s I commandeered a forum on the pre-web dial-in service Compuserve, and made it "Jim Leff Forum" (after a brief warm-up, months earlier, concocting a "Garlic Forum"). At the time, a personal online presence was like a slot on cable TV. There were no personal home pages. Compuserve wasn't about elevating Sally-Robinson-who-you-went-to-high-school-with. Compuserve was about elevating Hewlett Packard and USA Today and Roger Ebert. It was a shiny, big-money thing.

I acquired the keys to an abandoned forum, turned the lights back on, and tricked it out to make it discordantly personal - the zone of one guy and his pals - and it felt heady and startling enough that people absolutely freaked out (the prank was recounted in a book a few years later).

I can't explain it to anyone today, however. It sounds like the most nothing of nothings. The internet IS Sally-Robinson-who-you-went-to-high-school-with! So while milder, more incremental schemes of mine have stood up over time, my most creative exploit has zero impact in retrospect. It's laughably banal. There's nothing more passé than yesterday's future!