This might be a picture, from a college yearbook, of a graduating senior. The boy seems about the right age, looks intelligent, and has a serious expression -appropriate to his having accomplished some important task, like obtaining a degree. What’s different about it is, that it’s a painting rather than a photograph.
Young people in the 21st century have short attention spans, and not much sense of time. You can’t count on anyone younger than 25 to be able to follow anything longer than a music video or a pop song, This amounts to about three minutes.
And once something that happens is past -a party, a dance, a school year, a girl friend- it quickly fades in memory, drained first of color and then of identity, replaced by whatever new comes in across the network. Something that happened a year ago is part of the dim past.
And the sense of history has also been compressed. Young people are not taught, and often don’t have a clear picture of any real past beyond the events their own lives, or the lives of their parents at best. This amounts to a period of about sixty years, at most. Beyond that, the past, for them disappears into rumor and myth.
This being the case, there’s no reason for an artist or a builder to strain his will to create works that will stand the test of time. If there’s no memory of the past, there’s no point in working for the future either. – your pop song will last a year, your building a single lifespan -if you’re lucky. Nothing lives much longer than that. But people didn’t always work that way: look at this boy’s “yearbook” picture.
This image was painted by Botticelli, in around 1470. That’s 500 plus years ago, an incomprehensible period of time for people today. When this boy sat for his portrait, America and the Philippines didn’t exist as places at all; they weren’t even names on a map.
Our last year’s pop songs fade away, our old college photos rot in landfills, our old cars decay in the wastelands, forgotten. And all our distant ancestors have vanished into the anonymous sludge of time.
But this boy’s picture hangs in a museum, seen by hundreds every day. He seems still alive, as young as the day Botticelli painted him, 500 years ago. Great things last.
