Every artist hopes for two things: that their work will be appreciated in their lifetime. And that it’ll endure after their death.
That second hope is embarrassing for some artists to admit, but it shouldn’t be: If one of the purposes of art is to communicate — to ask for kinship and to bestow it — it’s only natural to wish for that conversation to continue across ages and eras. But it’s not just the creator who hopes their art might be found; it’s us, the audience, who are looking for it as well.
Which is why we all love rediscoveries so much. How thrilling it is to realize that a supposedly lost work has been available to us all along; how sad it is to realize it had gone unseen, unread, unloved for so long. The reasons for these works’ obscurity are various — some were doomed to the recesses of culture from the start. Some were overlooked because of their creators’ race, or gender or sexuality. Some because they didn’t adhere to prevailing tastes or politics (or because they couldn’t keep pace with changing times). Often, the reason is some combination of factors.
A rediscovery is a reminder that all art needs to be relevant is an audience — not a big one, necessarily, but a passionate one. In his story, the English professor and T writer at large Adam Bradley suggests a new way of framing essential Black American literature, delivering a list of works of poetry, drama and fiction that were long ignored by various artistic gatekeepers — both Black and white — for their complicated, unlikable protagonists; populist themes; formal inventiveness; or simply for being hard to categorize (and hence canonize) in the first place. Much of the art here was ahead of somebody’s time. And the new canon he posits is, he argues, a reflection of how cultural gatekeeping, and tastemaking, has changed, too. It’s now driven by those who always led the way — scholars and critics and publishers and other writers — but also by influencers and podcasters and social media users. “Operating outside of academia, these groups are making the canon less prescriptive and more descriptive,” he writes, “a dynamic record of what people are actually reading and enjoying now.”
One of life’s great searches is for a work of art we feel is made for us and us alone; finding such a work can be nothing short of an ecstatic experience. Knowing that it was out there for so many years makes us wonder what else is left for us to unearth. To discover art is to discover ourselves — which is also why the search never truly ends.
