"It's odd to think back on the time - not so long ago - when there were distinct stylistic trends, such as "this season's colour" or "abstract expressionism" or "psychedelic music". It seems we don't think like that anymore. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.
We're living in a stylistic tropics. There's a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don't have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It's all alive, all "now", in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it's old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources - cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them - it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political, and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life."
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