Engaging with lasting work

By the time I was in high school, Facebook was a big thing. I have many fond memories chatting with my friends on Facebook after school. Of course, this means that YouTube was also a big thing, and we’d send each other links to popular videos all the time. If both those things were true, then this obviously means that CliffsNotes and SparkNotes were readily available to help me with my homework. 

Since all these things were true for someone in high school in the late 2000s and early 2010s, they combine to mean that I spent a microscopic amount of time actually reading classic novels, or watching award-winning movies, or seeing great paintings. 

For those of us who grew up in the internet age, access to great art wasn’t the issue. The issue was having barely any reason to engage with it. 

All the artists and creatives I know say they want to create lasting work. We want to create art that means something beyond the daily algorithmic social media cycle. The trouble is, we haven’t really engaged with lasting art, beyond things we stumbled on. The latest, newest, funniest, most progressive pieces are all we engage with, thanks to the era we grew up in. 

Here’s a challenge for myself, and for you, if you’re interested: to engage with more classic art in 2025. Genre doesn’t matter. Medium doesn’t matter. What maters is that we see the building blocks of work that has stood the test of time.