Does photojournalism count as art? I'd say it's a relatively safe bet that some photos of the Twin Towers on 9/11 will still be very recognisable in several centuries.
It will be obscure and niche
historical curiosity that only people
researching the period will know in depth, though in their own interpretation like "The 1990's aesthetic". Its far more likely,
entire centuries will be culturally
compressed into future equivalent of "Middle Ages" and given
broad-stroke popculture treatment that
will distill major 'art' into modern
form that masses will consume as cultural product(like e.g. Medieval European fantasy genre) in form of
pseudo-historical entertainment.
What will likely survive longest is
factual/historical/technical documents
that have some mundane utility or
significance(treaties/manuals/licenses)
as long as civilization stands.
Art on the other hand is subjective and
tastes/preferences often change with
new generations forming new art.
"Classics" survive largely due institutions promoting their use and will become more obscure without
state support. We have this assumption
that "current culture" is valuable
forever but same could be said of all
past cultural period, that were replaced
by "current year culture": given that
technological progress allows easier culture creation it
would be highly likely a single person
in a future would generate equivalent
of "entire classical culture" tailor-made
for his taste by AI or something similar in a minute, without the need to study or
even know about its existence.
If I had to put money on a longbet that in all likelihood I won't live to see the outcome of, it would be anything Marvel or Disney ( with fragments of the Star Wars franchise being most likely ). Has enough global appeal and likely to have the necessary persistence.
Edit: Any religious text with sufficient population: Qu'ran, Bible, Torah, etc.
Edit 2: I realized only in the last 20 years. In that case, I stand by my original statement.
I would argue the exact opposite and say that pretty much all of the Marvel and Disney stuff is largely lacking in artistic value and will be forgotten. I feel like people in 500 years would not be very interested in seeing 500 different variations of good guy beating bad guy.
I'd say most storytelling throughout history has been good guy vs bad guy. I bet there were similar stories in 1400 AD. Knight-errant was a major literary genre during that era, probably similar to the superhero genre today.
Aristotle talks about three genres in Poetics: comedy, drama, and epic. He considered the epic as having the same elements as drama, but it's more reliant on song and spectacle. From the examples given, it sounds like Homer was the Stan Lee of the era.
Perhaps, but that reminds me, I forgot to mention the Bible. Facepalm. Of course the religious texts will still exist, and provide evidence for why I disagree with you. The surviving "books of the Bible" per KJV were simply the most popular by the Church of the time, perhaps because they (I'm no theologian ) served the interests of the Church/elites better at the time. In any case, I'm betting more on "breadth", than "depth".
The Marvel movie source material will be remembered (The original comic books from the 1960s). But in 500 years the movies will have repeated themselves so often I don't know if anyone will care about today's comic book adaptations. Nobody really cares about the 1910 Wizard of Oz film, for example, even if they love the 1939 later Wizard of Oz film.
To use your analogy in the other direction: nobody talks about the Wizard of Oz source material. Were you aware the movies were based on a book? Maybe Marvel comics will go the same way.
Great question. These are things I personally enjoy, but of the things I like, they generally have a) timeless or cross-culturally relevant messages that are b) relatively accessible.
I mean, the OP has posed an impossible question, and I'm prepared to be wrong. But unlike other commentators I don't think that Pokemon will have the same type of timeless appeal as, say, Shakespeare. The trick / hard thing to do is to separate current popularity from "sticking power." For a good illustration of how currently popular things can fade from memory, its worth checking out old best-seller lists (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...)
What will be known in 500yr will only be stuff of very major importance will be art that seeks to document or memorialize the most important events of our time.
What art do we have that's still widely known from the 1500s?
Well, outside of Mona Lisa and the works of Shakespeare the general Western public is probably only going to recognize depictions of the key players and events of the time. The official portrait of Henry VIII, depictions of Luther, the Spanish armada, the Spanish conquest of the new world, stuff like that.
With respect to purely creative works, e.g. Shakespeare, that was just high quality pop culture art of the time. They didn't know it would stand the test of time. Only looking back generations later was the influential art of the renaissance identifiable.
Even when it comes to current events most stuff that is of major "will be known in centuries" importance we don't yet know is of major importance and will not be identifiable as such until later.
The biggest shared cultural experience of the 16th century was the church, and it is omnipresent in the art we have remaining from then. Nowadays the biggest cultural touchstones are commercial.
I'm convinced the vast majority of humanity's cultural output over the last 100 years will be permanently lost to time within the next hundred, due to most of it being stored in ephemeral digital form. The likelihood of the partial or total collapse of technological civilization, infrastructure and knowledge transfer following the pending collapse of our biosphere is simply too great, and that chain of infrastructure and education is necessary to keep copying and updating all of that digital information from generation to generation, and maintaining a cultural awareness of the necessary software and media used. Unlike the Rosetta stone, you can't just look at an SSD drive and glean language from it.
What will remain is plastic - toys and garbage. Maybe future archaeologists will think our anime figurines were ceremonial fetish objects.
I'd say, almost none of it, and just as likely to be something that isnt recognized as art today.
Even the greats came within a whisker of obscurity, eg Bach was all but forgotten for a hundred years until Mendelssohn fought for his music to be unearthed and performed.
And to my second point, museums are full of ephemera that was disregarded in its lifetime but now tells us what we think is a lot about the time then. Roman trash and Victorian hairbrushes. What survives might not and hqve never been labelled "art"
And then you have the massive problem of digital rot. i can barely read my CDs from 20 years ago. Now we don't own our digital assets so much as pay for them to stay alive in an S3 bucket. When we pass, and stop paying, they will disappear. Like tears in the rain.
In 500 years we'll all be living in a VR world populated by AI agents, watching movies and playing games generated by AI specifically for our personal tastes. Content from this era will likely be mined and used as seeds for AI-generated content. So, in a sense, all of it.
I think what you're describing will happen within 100 years. 500 years though? Beats me. I think we'd be some weird consciousness blob similar to the one in Solaris.
This presents some interesting thought experiments around digital preservation and emulation. Will there be "software archeologists" in the future, pouring over ancient programming languages and attempting to execute or emulate these environments? It's kind of amusing to imagine a museum centuries in the future, trying to understand how to execute JVM bytecode, let alone how computers of the day worked. The Rosetta Stone of 2500? Hello World.
This is a funny thought. In 5000 years, at least some crazy person will think the people of 2022 were wise/profound/intelligent/whatever. They'll look at the code minting NFTs etc, think deep thoughts, write wise sounding blog posts about the wise people of 2022. He/she won't realize we are... a bunch of... not very wise people...
it's impossible to predict because actually what art is known in a timeframe changes depending on the taste not on the art itself. so your question is "what taste is common to humanity and did not change for 500 years". maybe porn? if it was considered art
Elon Musk will get turned into art and will be the main thing remembered from this time. He's going to succeed in building his city on Mars, and multiplanetary life will be the basic reality of people in 500 years. They'll wonder how their reality started, and it'll be perfectly clear it was Elon and his singular genius.
Elon is such a weird person that it's ridiculously easy to turn him into a character in a story, which people do all the time already, right now, with great abandon, even though Elon's a contemporary figure where you can go to one of his talks and see him in person if you want. People in 500 years will have fully turned him into a fantasy hero out of stories, especially if he dies in some way that will complete the pattern in people's heads of the self-sacrificing powerful slave (really really hope that doesn't happen to him).
Lots of his talks are up on Youtube, and he's amazingly transparent, he puts it right out there what he's doing and then delivers mind-bending tech. The Tesla Battery Day presentation in 2020 blew my freakin' mind, stuff like rearrangement of basic industrial processes like nickel refining, or the laser focus on scalability, capital requirements, speed, automation, the correctly-chosen goal of reaching a scale that can alter climate change.
Then people immediately make enormously confident statements about him that are the opposite of true, because they ignorantly think he's a joke because he's such a weird guy plus an actual well-meaning person.
I've never spotted Elon Musk telling a lie, and the stuff he says is consistently seriously insightful and on-point. In fact Elon seems to me to be the only person on Earth who's acting fully rationally. The stuff he does makes sense _all the way down_, where somebody like Barack was acting very rationally but was hemmed-in by the nature of his position as president, where his power to do the right thing was constrained by e.g. the Senate. Elon consistently goes along doing the right thing, not "the right thing" in the usual sense where the person's doing the best they can considering their circumstances, but objectively The Right Thing.
I had never seen or heard tell of anything like Elon Musk before I started noticing him in about 2014, and I'm 50, well-read, traveled, overeducated, keep a sharp eye on current events, try all the time to understand the world around me. I bitterly regret not going down to Texas for the Starship presentation in 2019. Turned out it was de facto open to the public because Boca Chica Village residents could come. It would've been awesome to be there on that windy night on the coast of Texas, with a small group of people listening to Elon, with a mockup Starship right behind him, and Tim Dodd got a cool little interview afterward. Fortunately it's all up on Youtube; but I prefer to go be at historic events in person whenever possible.
It's an interesting art to spot important things unfolding and get there in time, a real-world substantive sport. Predicting what art will be remembered in 500 years is interesting; judging what art from the past was significant is interesting; but judging reality in realtime well enough to show up yourself in person in time to be in on a historic event, to meet a person who is right now doing the significant thing, that I would say is the most interesting of all. Short of, of course, _being_ the person doing the historically-significant thing.
