Should Some Art Fade?

 Sonny Bunch over at Bulwark Goes to Hollywood thinks so in his Maybe Some Art Should Fade Away. I think he has a good argument, but I am not sure if I wholly like the idea:

Think about it this way: for the vast majority of the history of popular art, most things that are created end up vanishing into irrelevancy. How many novels were written in the 19th century that no one—literally, no one—alive today has ever even heard of? How many playwrights from Rome vanished into the ether? When a TV show that no one watched went off the air in the 1960s after a single season, it lived solely in the head of Quentin Tarantino, part of his vast reservoir of useless pop-cultural trivia that he could repurpose to great artistic effect in later years.

I’ve spent more time than anyone really should thinking about TV and whether or not anything from the so-called golden age of television will survive and what it would look like to create a proper canon of something as unwieldy as television shows that can run days, even weeks, in length if viewed in one sitting. And while I imagine the answer is yes—even if 200 years from now people are shocked we thought The Simpsons was any good when Dinosaurs and Cop Rock were right there in front of us all along!—I also wonder if our desire to make everything available forever is going to wind up making canonization much more difficult.

The natural state of the commercial artistic world is ephemerality, one in which a thousand books are published, ten become “hits,” and maybe one is remembered even ten years later. It’s that very ephemerality that leads to permanence: as works are forgotten and most of what is made fades into the mists of time, that which is left—that which succeeds with each given generation, that which remains vital and read and watched and loved and passed on—doesn’t get overwhelmed by an unending, obscuring fog bank of mediocrity.

If the argument is kept strictly to commercial art, then I feel more comfortable. Not completely, only more comfortable. I look at the cable stations running old TV shows - some of which look terrible in whatever format they have to show them in. I wonder if we are not trapped in a web of mindless nostalgia when we see Kolchak but not Night Gallery; Magnum P.I. but not Harry O. To my eyes, Bonaza does not hold up while Rawhide, High Chaparral and Have Gun, Will Travel do. 

On the other hand, we have had to live with the loss of most silent films. What effect has that had on our understanding of that era of film?

Also in mind is why there is this fade - merely fashion or a vested financial interest or third-party interference? I find much of interest in Nelson Algren, but he had the FBI dogging his work. In music, there is the classic rock format for radio, which I think rewrites history and indoctrinates people - where is Elton John, or David Bowie, Bob Seger before Night Moves, or more than two or three Lynryd Skynryd songs (particularly, Saturday Night Special)?

On the other hand, everything in this universe ultimately dies - the heat death of the universe will see to that. 

Against that particular ephemerality, there is the creation of art. That has to go on, or humanity loses the best of itself.

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