Surrounded by the dead

Interview with the brilliant Adam Curtis. On ‘static culture':

All culture always goes back and feeds off the past, it can’t help it, but there are two ways of doing it. Either you can go back and get inspiration from the past and create something genuinely new, which is the whole history of all sorts of things – not just art and music. What bothers me at the moment is that you get a very different sense out of pop culture, which is that it is literally like a form of archaeology. It’s going back and rebuilding it almost as a sort of work of art in itself. I mean its weird, it’s not just in pop music, you get it in a lot of avant-garde art at the moment. There are people going back and making plays based on Fassbinder films of the 1970s, and they’re just literally replicating it, and it’s very odd. And that’s why I was being a bit rude about Savages because, whilst Savages are technically extremely good, and live are extremely powerful, they are a bit like archaeologists from the 1920s, going back and digging up the tomb of Tutankhamen, and laying it all out for you to see, but they’re digging up The Slits, or New Order, or Siouxsie Sioux, and presenting it to us, and that’s it. It’s very odd. It’s almost like a terminus railway station in a city where all the trains just keep on arriving and nothing ever leaves.

[Via]