Ask HN: What recent art (last ~20 years) will be well known in 500 years?
Regardless of type: music, paintings, drawings, literature, movies, video games, sculpture, architecture etc.
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.
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.
- The Ministry for The Future, Kim Stanley Robinson (might be seen as an important historical marker of the spread of knowledge about climate change.)
- On the Nature of Daylight, by Max Richter?
- Coco (Pixar Film.)
- The Intouchables (Film)
- Possibly some of Brother Ali's recent discography? (Not sure if will be well known, but I predict a long shelf-life.)
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 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.
Oxford university?
What will remain is plastic - toys and garbage. Maybe future archaeologists will think our anime figurines were ceremonial fetish objects.
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 5000yr archeologists will read Elon's tweets and conclude that politicians have always sucked.
Architecture? Might depend on what's still standing in 500 years.
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.