How long does it take for us to be able to tell the difference between that which is of lasting value and that which deserves to be consigned to oblivion?  It is clear that popularity at the time does not mean that something will be popular in future ages.  Sir Walter Scott was immensely popular in the early 19th century, and even though he is still considered to be a great novelist today, his novels are not nearly as popular as that of his contemporary Jane Austen, whose novels he happened to review and whose worth he recognized only a bit after her death, making him at least one of the people at the time to recognize that she was a cut above the general novelist of her era.  The novels of Horatio Alger were immensely popular during their time and at the present time they are generally viewed as being worthy of ridicule, which is a bit unfair, one might imagine, since similar literature that focused on wealth going to deserving people has remained popular in the MLM marketing like Message to Garcia or Acres of Diamonds or the Richest Man In Babylon, literature which is by no means superior to Alger’s own tales.

When people are creating any sort of art, they do so from the point of view of their own time.  Fashion and technology as well as the fact that people are strongly influenced by their own peers and their own context mean that a great deal of very similar music, literature, and architecture (among other arts) are released at the same time, and some of that work survives to the future and is appreciated and other aspects of that work do not survive or survive for reasons separated from the quality involved.  At times what has been lost to the mists of time can be restored to a later time for reasons that may be difficult to discover, including the ubiquitous Canon In D with its standard four pop chords, which was not music that was appreciably different from the baroque music of its own place and time in 17th century Italy and is certainly a puzzling choice to be immortalized over the past few decades by those who would know little about music of the Baroque and Classical periods in the same way that many people read and enjoy Jane Austen without being familiar at all with other novels written during the Regency period.  That which survives and is appreciated by later generations seems to exist for many without a context, because it is enjoyed as a happy and fortunate relic rather than as a vibrant and possibly not atypical example of its own context.

All of this creates a great deal of difficulty for those who create in the here and now.  How do we know that what we make will endure?  There are situations, such as the music of the Beatles, where that which is immensely popular at the time remains popular throughout future generations because its quality is able to survive changing fashions.  There is simply enough Beatles music that is good enough that it is as relevant to contemporary music appreciation as it was at the time.  There are many situations, though, where contemporary fame does not long endure.  The fashions of the late 1970’s did not endure except in my father’s closet, where one could find a polyester leisure suit long after they had become nothing more than a humorous meme for society at large.  That which is hip and trendy at the time very often quickly becomes an embarrassing relic when times change, something that we can be relatively confident will happen to the innumerable hordes of unskilled trap artists and mumble rappers of our contemporary era.  Yet there are many cases when art and literature and music that are genuinely very good fails to endure.  The music of Lilly, for example, is very excellent even if it is extremely obscure at present more than three hundred years after Lilly’s death.  Likewise, Lope de Vega was an immensely talented and prolific playwright whose works deserve to be remembered, even if Spanish drama fared badly after the eclipse of Spanish military power and cultural influence over Europe as a whole.  To appreciate Lilly is to require in some respect the rehabilitation of French ancien regime culture, by no means an easy task for the court composer of the Sun King.

And so it goes.  There is nothing we can do to guarantee that our work will be seen as wheat and not chaff, and that our work will endure throughout time.  To be sure, once a work has endured long enough, there is enough force of habit that the work will likely endure for a lot longer.  Those writings that embed themselves within a language or culture can develop a great deal of staying power because they need to be understood if one is to understand a culture at large.  It is likely, for example, that the music of Aaron Copeland will endure if for no other reason than the importance of understanding Appalachian Spring or Rodeo or Dueling Banjos or Fanfare For The Common Man in order to understand other cultural phenomenons and the troubled relationship between the United States as a whole and its peripheral regions, especially in the South, or for the way that music becomes shorthand for whole conversations relating to athletic achievement or cultural backwardness.  Likewise, Shakespeare and the Bible have so embedded themselves in our language that in order to understand ourselves and the way that we talk we need to have at least some familiarity with those cultural artifacts like the Bible and Shakespeare’s drama that gave us this rich and colorful language that we use.  Once a work survives long enough to the extent which people both choose to appreciate the art and are forced to appreciate it by others, its survival chances greatly improve over the random art that is created in a given place and time.

Yet there are ways that this process can be helped.  For one, that which is created as part of a conversation can find itself embedded in a conversation that helps the art to remain relevant and viable long after the people who make it have died and long after the particular context of a given work has been forgotten.  At the same time, works that have a variety of accessible layers and facts may find it easy to be removed from their context and appreciated by others later on.  Here we see a tension between that which is created in a ponderous and immensely serious but not very appealing fashion that suffers when opinions and worldviews change and that which was taken seriously by one generation becomes a joke for a later one and those works which were immensely superficial and shallow and without any depth at all which can only be enjoyed in the moment by those with undemanding tastes and will not survive to be appreciated by later and discriminating students of the past.  If people make fun of middlebrow culture, it is far easier at present to celebrate the historical writing of people like Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote than it is to appreciate the writings of early German academic historians who were a bit too sanguine about the way that they had transcended the follies and superstitions of the time.  And it is very unlikely that anyone will be able to read future literature relating to sociology and identity politics without laughing at it in the same way that we laugh at the social realism of the Soviet Union and its puppet states for being so ridiculously full of cant and lacking in the verve of life.  If none of this gives us a template for success, it does at least suggest a way that we can seek to view ourselves from the point of view of an outsider, and to overcome the chronological snobbery that makes so much of what we create here and now useless to those who will have other ideas, other approaches, and other perspectives that we cannot at present even imagine in existence.