It is an interesting thought that a credible case can be made that we should forget most of the literature and art of the last century.
As I have said before, there seems to be this idea out there that the basic mindset of Positivism–the possibility of endless progress–should be applied to creative activities. In practice, this has meant since roughly the latter half of the 19th century that what was qualitatively different was, by definition, progress. Change=progress is a very old theme, one used just recently in a major political event.
But if I break my leg, that, too, is change. If my wife leaves me, I lose my job, get drafted to fight a war, contract influenza, and even when I die, those are all changes too.
Practically, to keep this effect from being obvious–to rationalize the otherwise unmistakeable ugliness which has attended much of the art world’s change of the last century–criteria of utility and beauty are rejected. The historical bases used to judge have been thrown out, and novelty and shared opinion enthroned as the only positions from which to evaluate new projects.
Yet, are we not all, to some lesser or greater extent, wrestling with problems of meaning, of purpose, of living more happily in a world quite eager to take it from us? Would not the task of art be to help us learn how to form meaning more easily, and not to make it harder?
So often, description gets called art. People whine and moan in public about suffering in the world, or their angst, or whatever crap is going on in their pathetic lives. Practically, this leads to the culture being led by those least qualified to do so, by those who have failed, and whose exclusion from society has compelled them to operate in different ways than those which tradition has granted us as at least provisionally acceptable and useful templates.
We have people more or less having nervous breakdowns in public, and calling it art. It is art, but it is not useful art.
From time to time I wonder about things like merging Positive Psychology Departments and the Humanities, such that one can assess the qualitative effects of reading, say, Jane Eyre, on people of different psychological types; or of evaluating the alterations in mood that attend listening to, say, a Mozart piano concerto, and comparing that effect to that of listening to Nine Inch Nails.
Culture as medicine, in other words.
We live in a multicultural society, do we not? We can adopt any “lifestyle”–any cultural gestalt–we want, without consequence in most cases. We can walk through the Chicago Art Museum, and see the best efforts of a dozen countries, from 30 centuries, at raising us into humanity. This is a given. What is not given is what works, for whom, where, and when.
These would all be interesting research topics.
Hey you: yes, you the one working on a doctoral thesis in English. Dump your Derrida and postfeminist deconstructionist analysis and figure out how to figure out the UTILITY of literature. You have to do something new anyway: why not make it actually interesting?