Here are iSteve readers' nominations for works of art that will survive Charles Murray's "Seriously?" Challenge
Steve Sailer here:
On Sunday, I wrote:
Enter the Charles Murray "Seriously?" Challenge: Murray told me in my UPI interview with him: "I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive -- and then ask, "Seriously?" Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the "Seriously?" question." (Buy Charles Murray's book Human Accomplishment here.)
A reader wrote in: "Might it not be amusing to throw Murray's challenge down to your readers, and start taking nominations? The Gulag Archipelago comes to mind. Anything else...?"
It seems like most of the art works I come up with are actually from the 1940s. For example, tragedy endures better than comedy, so I thought of Eugene O'Neil's Hard Day's Journey into Night, which was first produced in 1956, but O'Neil finished it by 1941.
There's no shortage of scientific accomplishments since 1950, although once again the power of the 1940s shows up in a reader's suggestion that Claude Shannon's 1948 paper on information theory and communications will go down as one of the landmarks in the history of the intellect.
So, Email me your nominations for post-1950 works of art that people will care about in A.D. 2203.
So, below are some nominees. Just remember, after each one, you have to wrinkle up your brow and raise your eyelids and say, "Seriously?"
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"The Lord of the Rings" 1954/1955.
"100 Years of Solitude" - Not at all to my tastes, but still.
Some of the works of Saul Bellow might pass the test.
I don't think the "Gulag Archipelago" qualifies. To the best of my
knowledge it is a historical treatise, not a novel.
Here are a few lists of great novels of the 20th century. I am the wrong
person to identify the enduring works. However, someone in their right
mind might be able to.
Random House -
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html
Radcliffe - http://www.radcliffe.edu/news/pr/archive/980721_top100.html
Waterstond (British) - http://www.wesselenyi.com/top100books.htm
There are some post-1950 works in the following list of all-time
greatest books.
Observer -
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1061037,00.html
I don't think it was entirely fair for Murray to exclude movies. Much of
the cultural energy of the post WWII world has been diverted into film.
This partially explains the paucity in other realms. I would also argue
that the deficiency of great art is probably a good thing, reflecting
the absence of great wars, great famines, great epidemics, etc.
What about architecture? Assuming we get Al Qaeda under control, a great
many post-1950 buildings will still be standing in 2203 as monuments
(figurate and literal) to our era. At one time, I used to tell people
that the WTC would likely stand for 500 years and would astound folks in
2500 AD as much as the pyramids amaze us. Alas, I was wrong.
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Nabokov
(my favorite like yours is Speak, Memory, but I¹d qualify Lolita,
Pale Fire, AND Pnin) Stoppard, Godfather I & II ,Casablanca, The Searchers,
The Gulag Archipelago, all of Larkin, Ted Hughes, maybe Waugh, and a few
utterly eccentric choices: T. H White¹s The Once and Future King, travel
writing by Norman Lewis and Patrick Leigh Fermor, and just possibly Fred
Turner¹s epic Mars exploration poem Genesis. Maybe some more Russians. Also
some of the best jazz‹ not a good enough critic to say which. There are some
new serious composers that may surprise us. And the best painters today
paint wildlife (NOT the popular ³calendar artists²!), and may last like the
anonymous 17th Century Japanese and many Chinese from many eras. (See 2
Blowhards archives on an early 20th Century painter of animals, Karl
Rungius.).
The arts may be starting to get real again.
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When I first read what Murray said about post-1950 culture days ago, one
exception popped into my head immediately.
The Dave Brubek jazz album "Take Five".
I mean, how can anyone hear the cut "Take Five" and think no one will care
about it in 200 years?
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I was disappointed that the first responses to Murray's challenge posted on your blog included Nabokov's Lolita, but not Pale Fire, which is hands down the greater accomplishment. I am glad you endorsed Pale Fire over Lolita yesterday. Charles Kinbote, the author of the Pale Fire commentary, meets Harold Bloom's test for great literary art in that he is entirely original and unlike anything that preceded him in literature. At the same time he's a fully realized, warm blooded human being who is immensely sympathetic and likable despite supreme vanity and selfishness.
I would nominate Stanley Kubrick as another counter-example to Murray's claim about post-WWII culture. Dr. Stragnelove is brilliant in its depiction of the catastrophic potential of the Cold War. The dialogue between the U.S. president and the Soviet premier in that film merit comparison to Tolstoy's rendering of the tsar and Napoleon in War and Peace. In Paths of Glory (an early 50s B&W), Kubrick tells a great story about the trenches of occupied France in WWI while documenting in a really entertaining way the necessary inhumanity of military strategy. Last, 2001 is the best artistic propaganda for space exploration ever made. The film sweeps from the evolution of tool using pre-hominids, to space exploration, and the onto mankind's next evolutionary step, toward potential godhood. It's still exquisite looking, more than 30 years after the shoot. I think it should if becomes more popular once our anemic space exploration efforts begin to pick up steam.
I'm a regular reader of your blog and VDare. I appreciate your efforts to disabuse elite America of its fantasy that ethnicity and race are meaningless.
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Early De Sica and Fellini (before the 1st went soft and the 2nd went crazy). Great movies. Humane, beautiful, emotionally wrenching.
Two Women
La Strada
Umberto D
Bicycle Thief
Open City
Paisan
Oh, Bunuel. Crazy. Master.
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"We will rock you" by Queen will be the only rock song remembered
because it has the word "rock" in it and thus can be used as an
exemplar of the rock era and lastly it can be sung by a mob.
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First of all, I think 2203 is ridiculously far into the future to make predictions. I'm just thinking in terms of the next 30-50 years.
"Classical" Music (I'm not a musician, just a fan)
The post-1950 composers I would bet on to survive & prosper include: Shostakovich, Lutoslawski, Ligeti, Messiaen, Adams. All have in common a musical language that is advanced but not beyond the comprehension of your average educated listener, & an individual style of their own.
I also think the greatest jazz works will survive, and may eventually be seen as part of the classical tradition in Western music.
Films
I expect the best films of Bergman, Bunuel, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, & Kurosawa to survive & to grow in stature. Notice I listed no Americans. This is because I think American directors are too tied in to the quotidian and formulaic to survive the social circumstances they function in.
Literature
The best science-fiction and fantasy writers will continue to grow in stature, because they could deal with important human problems via recourse to invented worlds that won't require a degree in history to understand. I'm thinking of Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard, and Stanislaw Lem. Possibly Tolkien too.
Some outstanding examples of realism have a good chance of surviving, like Nabokov's "Lolita" and maybe the occasional product of some heavy-hitting novelist like Bellow or Roth. I don't expect the Pynchon or DeLillo types to last in the long run.
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Although I most agree with Mr. Murray, here are a couple of
exceptions
Billy Wilder's movies:
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
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Steve, on the Murray challenge, I agree completely with the gist of your blog entry. Post-1950 paintings, forget it -- none will be remembered, and not only that but Picasso, Joan Miro, Rousseau, Piet Mondrian, and other poseurs from BEFORE 1950 will be totally forgotten as well, not to mention the non-entities Andy Warhol, the guy who went around hanging curtains around things, and some other fakes from after 1950 and Jackson Pollock who straddled the middle of the century I believe.
BUT -- don't movies have to be considered an art form? There are LOTS of them from after mid-century that are great and will be remembered (not nearly as many as from before, but still ... ). The Ben Hur with Charleton Heston, for example, will never be forgotten. There are others of course.
The two most overrated artistic productions of the 20th century are Picasso's paintings and the movie "Citizen Kane." "Citizen Kane," constantly said by know-nothings to be the best Hollywood movie ever, actually ranks somewhere in the several hundreds or possibly even thousands down the list, must be. Without any preparation or forethought, just on the spur of the moment, I could start rattling off names of movies as fast as a tobacco auctioneer that are better than "Citizen Kane" and without hesitation get through I'd guess a couple hundred just off the top of my head, scarcely pausing to take a breath. If I paused, I could name another few hundred at least. And I'm not even a movie buff -- just have come to know most of the old classics because my wife knows them all. I mean, Camille with Greta Garbo, Gone With the Wind, Ben Hur, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Red River, Stagecoach, ... don't even get me started. Citizen Kane? What a laugh!
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Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
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Lolita
A handful of poems -- Larkin, Betjeman, Wilbur.
The Sydney opera house.
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Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
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My nomination for an artwork people will care about in 2203 is Nabokov's Lolita. Personally, I hope people are still reading Marguerite Duras, but I doubt her accomplishments will survive her so-called fans. Like Zora Neale Hurston, her female acolytes refuse to admit how subversive she really was. If I think of anything else, I'll let you know.
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I was thinking about Dr. Murray's question about which novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that I seriously believe people will still care about 200 years from now. Assuming Homo sapiens are still around in something approximating their present form:
I think the Beatles will survive, if not their performances, certainly their songs. The tunes are infectious enough that I think people will be humming them a long time. "Yankee Doodle" has made it over 200 years. "The Yellow Rose of Texas" is over 150, maybe older. Some folk songs are considerably older than those two. I think a lot of Beatles songs are just as catchy.
I think quite a few popular tunes in general will survive, but I don't really have a guess as to which ones. A catchy song is a catchy song, though, and quite a few have survived for a long time. I think a test would be to go around and find out which songs almost everyone knows across generations. For example, a few years ago, George Will wrote a column about his young daughter and her friends being able to sing "Satisfaction." That tune will survive, although its lyrics might not.
I'm not qualified to comment on classical music. I gather that much contemporary classical makes use of a lot of discordance. My guess is that anything that requires a degree in music to be appreciated probably won't survive outside of an academic setting.
I'm not as sure about the novels of Robert Heinlein, but I think they have a chance. There are a lot of people who find reading his books to be an intensely enlightening experience. The technology in almost all of his work is already dated, but people still keep reading it. His books still remain in print, and I still keep finding people whose lives have been changed by them. A manuscript that he wanted destroyed is about to debut as a bestseller. I can't think of any other relatively recent writer who has a readership that cares so intensely. That he can be so polarizing is all to the good when considering his potential longevity. To support my speculation, Jules Verne is still being read.
It isn't a novel, song, or painting, but Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech will survive.
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Oh, I'd guess Churchill's six volumes of The Second World War, but that is history, not fiction. Or maybe the first two Godfather movies and perhaps the stage musical Evita. But the real tests will not be pure artistic quality, but how well does a work of art represent the spirit of the age, or at least that spirit as seen and sifted by future generations. And, of course, whether the work, however crude, represents something new in art, a direction that was later pursued by perhaps much more gifted artists, just as writers of most novels, plays, TV shows and movies have imitated the new realism in Dumas's dreadful "Camille" for 160 years.
The reputation of novels and artists is especially dependent on very shifting judgments. I'd be interested to know how well Dickens' novels were regard by contemporary critics of high literature in his own day, or how well the European public received the great Russian novelists in the late 19th Century. There is a foreshortening of perspective that comes with that angle of "the last 50 years."
And I will pose Bloom's question. How many of the great works of literature on Murray's list can be read for pure pleasure today, with the exception of Shakespeare's plays, and those only when very well performed.
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Let's get the toughest one out of the way first: paintings.
I'm assuming that Murray believes that our long post-modernist anti-art interlude will not last 200 years; that, in that span of time, either our civilization will have collapsed (in which case nothing will be remembered) or will have reconnected with our historic traditions and made sense of the modernists' achievements in a way that is lasting.
I will assume, for the sake of argument, that appreciation for pure abstraction is a casualty of that precess of re-connection with tradition, so that what survives, and is of interest to artists of two-centuries hence, is art that art which is recognizably figurative. The only portraitist of stature I can think of is Chuck Close. One of the more interesting practitioners of the still life is William Bailey. I'm racking my brains trying to think of someone doing landscape of any stature. Will these people survive? Let's put it this way: I think it's a better bet than Jasper Johns, or Cindy Sherman, or the rest of that crowd. And if you assume great mid-century abstractionists survive 200 years, then the challenge is too easy. If you allowed sculpture into the mix, I think it would be a little easier to come up with names; Giacometti was still doing fine work in the 1950s, though his masterpieces are from the 1940s. It is conceivable to me that no meaningful number of painters since 1950 will be remembered in 200 years. It's also conceivable to me that the painting tradition will not be knit up; since the advent of photography the social function of painting has changed fundamentally, and it's not obvious to me that a restoration will be as easy as it might be for some of the other arts (e.g. poetry) nor as urgent as for yet others (e.g. architecture).
Next: novels.
To start, I'm going to make the same assumption as for painting: that in 200 years we will have reconnected with broken traditions and that the present period will appear as something of a anomaly. But this is a much harder case to make for the novel than for painting, because there has been no hiatus in the writing of novels that read like novels. Tom Wolfe thinks that no one else is doing realism, but that isn't true at all. It may be that for a while the high-culture mandarins disdained the traditional novel, but the novel is not supposed to be a high-culture form, and the popular novel remains realistic, basically. I'm surprised the challenge isn't to find *poetry* that will survive; that would be much harder.
Out of appreciation, I'll nominate Wolfe's A Man in Full as one book that might survive as a good example of late-20th-century realism. But it's not a Great Book. I could as easily choose the best work of Robertson Davies, or The Book of Ebenezer Lepage (whoever wrote *that*), or Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. None of these are Great Books, but they are all good books, and could conceivably survive, though the odds are against any one of them. We're assuming the likes of Thomas Pynchon are headed for the dustbin; if he goes, the Don Delillos all go with him. But Lolita will definitely survive. It is a Great Book, not just a good one, and it is not an anti-novel in the mode of Gravity's Rainbow. Does it compare with the work of Tolstoy or Dickens or Cervantes? No. But does it compare with Fielding or Sterne or Richardson? I don't see why not. And if you allowed in drama, Beckett's End Game was written in the 1950s, and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (his only good play) was written in the 1960s, and both of these will survive if any of our drama does. They are neither of them better than Chekhov. But they are miles better than anything written during the Restoration, and people are still putting on Congreve now and again. He's not, in any event, forgotten.
Finally: songs.
Really? No post-1950 songs? Has he been living in a cave?
Just to pick two great popular groups post-1950 who wrote their own songs, much of the oeuvres of The Beatles and The Band will survive essentially indefinitely. They wrote great popular songs, certainly comparable to anything in the 200 years that preceded them. Next, the American musical theater reached its apogee in the 1950s with shows like Guys and Dolls. Do you think they'll still be doing Pirates of Penzance in another 100 years? Then they'll still be doing Guys and Dolls in 200. But the best case for post-war music is also the most obvious. I am confident that the jazz classics of the 1950s will outlast much of the modernist classical music of the early 20th century. I mean, which do you think is more accomplished: Kind of Blue or The Rite of Spring? I'm not even going to bother to list the great artists of the era; there are too many to name. It's inconceivable to me that the period will not be remembered for its extraordinary musical fecundity. It certainly won't be forgotten. Whether there's anyone remotely comparable composing and performing today is another matter, but that's not the challenge.
If, perhaps, Murray would disqualify all of the foregoing by saying that orchestral music had undergone a precipitous decline by then, I would make two comments. First, if modernist music is to be deplored, he needs to reach back further than 1950 for his cutoff. Second, if orchestral music is all that qualifies then the era of musical accomplishment in the West is itself terribly short - three centuries long, no more. And that seems to me to be extraordinarily myopic. There are moments and places of extraordinary intellectual or artistic achievement that are never really equalled. There will probably never be another Shakespeare, or another Beethoven, or another Aristotle. But that doesn't mean that a Richard Sheridan, or a Scott Joplin, or a William James is worthless and doomed to be forgotten.
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That's an interesting and difficult challenge. First I think we have to decide who "anyone" is. I assume we have to mean art critics and general intellectuals. If we look at the music of 1803 we have Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber, Franz Schubert, and Rossini. People know of their music but sales are weak in comparison with Eminem et al. Also, we have to bear in mind that in 1803 composers of previous generations were largely ignored by the public because the historical consciousness we take for granted now was not common then. JS Bach was unperformed until around 1860 if memory serves. Mozart and Beethoven knew his work but the public showed no interest.
So if we take this challenge in terms of critics and intellectuals and we assume that the historical consciousness remains intact (it might not - people might be interested only in current work) then I wouldnominate the following composers and works.
Elliott Carter - String Quartet No. 1 (1951)
Phillip Glass - Einstein on the Beach (1976)
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (1959)
Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians (1979)
John Coltrane - My Favorite Things (1961)
It's more difficult to predict the historical view of composers closer to our own era so I haven't tried. But another point I would like to raise here is that conservatives and most libertarians are notorious for simply not enjoying new art of whatever kind. I don't doubt that much of what has been produced since 1950 will be obscured by history but that is true of all eras. I suspect that if my conditions are met regarding historical consciousness quite a few works will survive and that people like Charles Murray will be viewed as old fogies - as far as their taste in music is concerned.
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I'd nominate Dune and V.S. Naipaul's better works, i.e. A House for Mr. Biswas and his examination of the Islamic world Among the Believers and Beyond Belief. The latter two, I believe, will be read again and again for both their revealing historical content and sublime style. I'd nominate Tom Wolfe, but much of his work dates itself. I seriously doubt that the events in Bonfire of the Vanities will have any meaning 200 years from now. Technically, Lord of the Rings came out after 1950, so it should technically make the cut, but I don't know if it really should count as most of it was composed in Tolkien's head during the forties.
Also, Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons.
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Let's see here, how about these:
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror -1973
Paul Johnson, Intellectuals -1989
Paul Kennedy, The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers -1987
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism -1974
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind -1953
Garet Garret, The People's Pottage -1953
Ludwig von Misses, Human Action - 1949 ... close enough, eh?
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My nomination for a post-1950 work of art that people will care about in A.D. 2203:
Ayn Rand's novel _Atlas Shrugged_, published 1957. OK, about two-thirds of it was written in the 1940s, but that means nothing.
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See, the problem is that the art and literary and music worlds have been
taken over by classes or large cliques, by conspiracies of mediocrity, that
will simply not allow anything worthy to transpire. The interests of the mediocre in assaulting "quality" and the western tradition generally should
be obvious. A dim bulb shines bright if it's the only light in the room. Literature today is in much the same predicament as genuine religious
feeling in the Church of England when the parents of third or unusually feeble sons of the gentry would purchase them situations in the church
because there was no other way for them to get on in the world. Today we have a similar situation, where men and women, well, mostly women and
homosexuals, with really nothing going for them but infinite narcissism and oodles of the right connections, hold all the positions in the literary and
artistic worlds and effectively bring down an iron curtain against any hint of the genuine article - which of course would be extremely threatening to
their livelihoods and sense of self-importance.
I fervently believe that the real stuff is out there - but like so much else
that's true and good in our time, it's just not allowed to become public. I
mention only two novels which, not wholly uncoincidentally, I published myself when I had a small press:
The Cold Land, by Wesley Fultz (1987)
The City of Despair, by Urban Strietz (1992)
And I've just finished reading one of the greatest true tales of adventure and unspeakable suffering, which rises to the level of art I think, The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz, about an escape from a Soviet labor camp, through Sibera, Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, Tibet...an almost incredible story, exceeding well told...so why have I never heard of it even whilst the jejune travel maunderings of the likes of Paul Theroux are daily thrust in my face? Because Slavomir Rawicz is not the right sort of people and he doesn't tell the right sort of story (indeed, by definition, anything with any truth in it can never be the right sort of story, since the literary elite *exists* by lies and mendacity).)
In short, I believe there is still great artistic achievement out there, but it's being utterly excluded, denied existence, by a rotten, creepy system of rotten, creepy people which exists for the purpose of promoting and enshrining their own rotten, creepy works. And just as commissars to preserve the nomenklatura and their privileges were obliged to stamp out all evidence of free enterprise, so these people must, given the logic of their position, endeavor ruthlessly to extirpate any trace of genuine art.
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Nabokov, Stoppard, Godfather I & II
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As far as great music is concerned, Shostakovich: Symphonies 10-15 (especially the 13th!), Bernstein's "West Side Story", and Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem". Furthermore, why aren't films included in your "works of art" debate? That would solidify the prescence of any number of movies that will be revisited and revisited for years to come.
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I believe that there are quite a few post-1950 novels that will be remembered in future generations. One of them was written by a man who is still living - JD Salinger. His 1951 novel, "Catcher in the Rye", is probably the most influential American novel of the post World War Two years.
What about Joseph Heller's anti-war novel, "Catch-22", published in 1961? The novel's title has been immortalized, as a commonly used phrase in the English language. Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1958) is also a classic. I am not sure if Capote's other famous work, "In Cold Blood" (1966), which was intended to be a non-fiction work, can qualify as "art" or history, when you consider that many parts of the book deviated from the truth.
And while Gore Vidal's controversial political views detract from his greatness as a novelist, some of his books are worthy of mention. When Vidal's "Myra Breckenridge" was published in 1968 (when I was still a kid), people of my parents' generation sneered at the work as vulgar art. But the rapidly changing ideas on sexuality that have taken place since then, have not only made "Myra Breckenridge" a tame work; the novel is actually considered a classic in literature departments in some universities. Out of the many historical novels that Vidal wrote, "Washington DC" (1967) and "Lincoln" (1984) stand out. The latter book ("Lincoln"), which was a deconstruction of our 16th President, made Vidal extremely popular among conservative Southerners who once sneered at him for the "Myra" book.
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I would nominate the Philip Larkin's "The Whitsun Weddings" (1964), which, besides its intrinsic merits, will be remembered because it is so obviously an end point in the poetic canon. Lolita was published in 1955, I hope people in 200 years still wish to visit the world captured in its pages. I think it possible some of Guy Davenport's work will be more admired in 200 years than it is now (see his story collection DaVinci's Bicycle), partially because his writing may be looked back upon as the seeds of a future renewal of western letters. Even in non-artistic periods there will always be isolated or eccentric works of genius, but note that the creators of the above nominees (and I suspect all of the reasonable nominees you recieve) had their artistic sensibilities formed by the high-modernism of the early part of the century. Civilization died in the trenches of World War I, as the saying goes...
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Murray's basic point is quite correct. But his date, at least for music, is a few years off. The great tradition in Western music did not end until 1975/6, with the deaths of Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten. All of the following works from the years 1951-1975 will survive, as long as Bach, Beethoven and Brahms themselves are remembered:
1951 Igor Stravinsky/The Rake's Progress Dmitri Shostakovich/24 Preludes & Fugues op. 87 Benjamin Britten/Billy Budd op. 50
1952 Sergei Prokofiev/Symphony no. 7 op. 131 Dmitri Shostakovich/String quartet no. 5 op. 92
1953 Dmitri Shostakovich/Symphony no. 10 op. 93 Benjamin Britten/Gloriana op. 53
1954 Benjamin Britten/The Turn of the Screw op. 54
1956 Francis Poulenc/Flute sonata Dialogues des Carmelites
1957 Ralph Vaughan Williams/Symphony no. 9 Dmitri Shostakovich/Cello concerto no. 1 op. 107 Symphony no. 11 op. 103
1960 Dmitri Shostakovich/quartets nos. 7, op. 108; & 8, op. 110
1961 Benjamin Britten/War Requiem op. 66
1962 Dmitri Shostakovich/Symphony no. 13 op. 113
1964 Dmitri Shostakovich/String quartets nos. 9-10 op. 117-8
1969 Dmitri Shostakovich/Symphony no. 14 op. 135
1971 Dmitri Shostakovich/Symphony no. 15 op. 141
1973 Benjamin Britten/Death in Venice op. 88
1974 Dmitri Shostakovich/String quartet no. 15 op. 144 Suite on Verses of Michelangelo op. 145
1975 Dmitri Shostakovich/Viola sonata op. 147 Benjamin Britten/String quartet no. 3 op. 94
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I do think the paintings of the Wyeths of Maine, father and son, will stand the test of time. Most of the senior Wyeth's great work was done in the 50's and 60's. His son is also doing work I consider first rate. But I stand by Andrew Weyth as an artist who will come out of this era as a truly great American painter, and artist.
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Some people have mentioned the Beatles, but I really don't think so. I'm a huge Beatles fan, but I think they are too tied up in the zeitgeist of the 60's to really have anything to say to later generations. Good stuff, but it's welk crafted pop, not much more. And somebody mentioned The Band, but the Band is really nothing without their main inspiration...
So, I have to go with Bob Dylan. Songs like "Visions of Johanna", "Mr. Tamborine Man", or "Shelter from the Storm" (just to name a few off the top of my head) just have a depth to them that ordinary pop tunes don't. I myself have been listening to them for almost two decades now, and I keep finding new things in them. That seems to me to be what gives a work staying power...
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Balanchine ballets. Greatest choreographer, ever.
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I'll offer Louis Armstrong's Hot 5 and Hot 7 recordings, and almost all of Duke Ellington's stuff. Gershwin's music will still be enjoyed, and Prokofief's 5 symphonies will finally be played. Alas, no one will remember Bix's Dardanella...
Counterpoint: You have a date problem in meeting Charles's challenge. Gershwin d. 1937 and Prokofiev's Fifth was 1944. He died 1953.
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Lolita is the best novel ever written, published in 1955.
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Painting, like architecture, is a victim not so much of decline as of premeditated murder. The visual arts will more likely be represented by such as the photographers Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau and Karsh. (But then, they're all pre-1950 products who were blessed to live and work for many years after that date.)
Alan Ayckbourn, not Neil Simon, should be the Molière of our day. (Every decadent age has its Juvenal.)
Melody follows money, which explains the two most striking musical phenomena of the 20th century-- the disappearance of Italy and Germany, and eventually Russia, from the scene (do orchestras need monarchs?), and the fact that 20th-cent. popular music, "tin pan alley", is so much more memorable than its "serious" counterpart. Of the pre-1950 pop powerhouses-- Italy, Germany, France, the U.S., Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil-- only the last was worth anything after 1970, though Broadway/Hollywood did have a good run in the '50s. Bossa nova is the only adult genre of note born after 1950, and will live on; the better rock tunes might survive as nursery rhymes. (E.g., early Beatles, not late...)
I collect the works of three composers often dismissed as lightweights, Ernesto Lecuona, A. C. Jobim and Leroy Anderson, the latter two post-1950. Word is slowly leaking out that their catalogues go far, far deeper than their somewhat overplayed calling card pieces suggest, and these tortoises ought to last. But long-form snobbery can hold them back. (Shoulda worked on that sonata!)
None of this contradicts Murray's basic thesis; it just extends his deadline a decade or two in a couple of areas.
Another point: a great deal of post-1950 artistic and literary energy was channeled into areas which by nature preclude survival no matter how high the quality: industrial design (T'Birds, iMacs, etc.), advertising ("think small"), comic strips (Peanuts, Calvin, BC-- i.e., Hart's and Breathed's), journalism, magazine art, sitcoms, soundtracks and the like. But some of these fields are so new it's no surprise, nor comfort, that they'd blossom after 1950.
If Pitirim Sorokin is correct in positing an "ideational/sensate" cycle, then the man to bet on is Arvo Pärt. When holy, recivilizing 23rd-cent. ideationalists recoil at our late-Romanesque sensate perversions, his monastic airs will smell like a rose to them.
P.S. Murray's placement atop his list of Italy, France, Germany and England-- the medieval melting pots of Europe-- says something for hybrid vigor, doesn't it?
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Dont know about works of Art, but as a writing on Politics and Society, I suspect Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" might still be read in 2203 or 2603 for that matter (provided Human Beings havent lost interest in philosophical perspectives altogether).
This book is comparable to Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America".
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