When Art Becomes Dated

Tom Vanderbilt tackles the topic:

“What makes a work of art seem dated is a sort of overdetermined reliance on the tropes, whether of subject or style, of the day—a kind of historical narcissism. … Datedness runs in all kinds of temporal directions. Science fiction, the genre that should seem the least dated, can often feel the most, because the future as depicted came to pass and looked nothing like that. In the same way that period films often commit the mistake of showing everyone driving shiny new period cars (as those are the only ones that have survived to the present), science-fiction films often assume that the future, to paraphrase William Gibson, will be “evenly distributed”—that everything, from computers to clothes, will represent a radical break from today. A film like “Blade Runner,” however, reminds us that periodicity can be messy. As Gibson has written, the best way to write about the future is to write about the present.