Someone foresaw, profoundly, that this century was going to require [...]: that when forward motion became impossible, ambitious culture was going to have to take another shape. [Amy] Winehouse, as producers and collaborators have reminded us since her death, was an inveterate collector and compiler of musical clips. (The drummer and music historian Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, remembered: "She would always be on her computer sending me MP3s: 'Listen to this, listen to this.... "") She was living through, and channeling into "Back to Black," the initial dissolution of history into streams of digital information, disembodied, disintermediated, each no further from the present than a Google prompt. She freely recombined those fragments but never indulged in nostalgia; she was disappointed by the present but knew there was no going back. And at enormous personal cost, she created something enduring out of it, showing how much harder it would be to leave a real mark amid fathomless data - to transcend mere recombination, sampling, pastiche.
If the arts are to matter in the 21st century, we must still believe that they can collectively manifest our lives and feelings: that they can constitute a Geistgeschichte, or "history of spirit," as the German idealists used to say. This was entirely possible before modernism, and it is possible after. The most ambitious abstract painters working today, like Albert Oehlen and Charline von Heyl, are doing something akin to Winehouse's free articulation: drawing from diverse and even contradictory styles in the hunt for forms that can still have effects. Olga Tokarczuk structured her 2007 book, "Flights," as a constellation of barely connected characters and styles, more fugitive than the last century's novels in fragments; to read her is less like looking at a mosaic than toggling among tabs. Bad Bunny, working at the crossroads of trap, reggaeton, bachata and rock, is crafting pick-and-mix aggregations of small pieces, like "Back to Black," that are digital in every way that matters. All of them are speaking out of parts of the past in a language that is their own.
- Jason Farago, 'Why Culture Has Come To A Standstill', New York Times, 10 October 2023
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