When does the new get old?

Yesterday’s news – When does the new get old?

TEXT Stefan Kutzenberger

Who wants yesterday’s papers, the Rolling Stones wanted to know in 1967 – a year that saw almost unprecedented clashes between old and new. It was the year Concorde made its debut in France, race riots erupted in the United States, a horrific war raged in Vietnam, and the Summer of Love was proclaimed in San Francisco. Inundated as we are by these constant collisions of polar opposites, why should we still find yesterday’s headlines interesting? “Is there anything older than yesterday’s news?”, the Stones would seem to be asking. But how long do new things stay new? Do newspapers lose their validity at midnight, or when the next issue is published? Today we needn’t even wait 24 hours for the next issue: online platforms update their news every few hours, and often even more frequently. This news cycle is most remorseless in the coverage of politics, but the lifespans of otherwise sedate mediums like novels are shrinking too. Publishers still operate on six-monthly cycles for their new releases, but that doesn’t mean a new book is guaranteed six months’ grace before becoming outmoded. If it doesn’t prove popular during its first few weeks, it gets sold off cheap like a piece of dated kitsch.

The adjective and literary genre “novel”, both derive from “nouvel”, the French word for “new”. A few years ago, the Scottish writer Ali Smith began an experiment in which she took the term literally. She announced that she planned to pen a four-part cycle of novels – entitled Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer – in which she described what was happening around her, practically in real time. Literary critics were skeptical about this venture, wondering aloud whether a novel produced at such speed could possibly be good. “Autumn”, the first part, was published in October 2016, just four months after the Brexit Referendum. And not only could Ali Smith claim to have written the first Brexit novel. It was a great novel too, selected as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times. Summer, the series finale, was published in August 2020. Again, despite her antiquated medium, the author managed to produce an ultra-topical novel about the lockdown during the pandemic. Ultimately, how long these novels remain “new” does not depend on their subject matter: it hinges on their quality as works of art. Art Nouveau is still regarded as art although it is no longer regarded as “new.” Yet the never-seen-before comprises the essence of modern art. While the eras of the past took ages to end – think of the Gothic period, Renaissance, Baroque and so on – contemporary art has really stepped on the gas. All of a sudden, the benchmark was no longer a proximity to prevailing ideals. It was being new and different that counted. And when movements are no longer new, they need to be replaced. Almost overnight, the longevity of art epochs shrank from centuries to a few years, as one new “ism” replaced the previous and the pace grew ever more relentless. Impressionism, Expressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, Surrealism all followed in quick succession – until no more acceleration was possible. At that point, people remembered the past. Looking back became acceptable again, as did citing the styles of former periods and creating a new world from their building blocks. With that, the world embarked on a new era: postmodernism, which is basically an incarnation of modernism. In other words, we can’t afford to rest on our laurels, because the imperatives of speed and novelty still reign supreme. What is new is deemed good (begging the evil-twin question: is good still deemed good?). One thinks of a man who buys a new coat, only to discover that he no longer likes his other clothes. He gradually upgrades his existing wardrobe until the new coat has become the oldest item, and itself needs replacing. And so the cycle begins anew. Our consumer society as a whole seems to follow this pattern: a new cellphone is only good if it is the latest model, even if the previous one is only a year old.

The arbitrary nature of our fixation with the new is highlighted when the new happens to be older than the old! In a 2011 exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s works, the National Gallery in London presented a newly discovered piece by the Italian master. Created in 1500, it was entitled “Salvator Mundi.” Although Mona Lisa was probably completed 15 years later, “Savior of the World” is now known as “the new Leonardo.” Or rather as “the expensive Leonardo,” because it fetched 450 million dollars at an

auction in 2017, making it the world’s most costly painting by far. Jesus is accustomed to being called “new”; after all, his biography – now nearly 2,000 years old – is still called the New Testament. The term “new” is therefore quite elastic and can even start to age itself – rather like the “New World” that has been inhabited by Europeans for five centuries and should therefore have grown old long ago. That said, complaining about “the youth of today” is neither original nor new. The first schools were built 5,000 years ago, and on one Sumerian clay tablet a teacher complains that “the young no longer respect their elders.” That was still the case with the ancient Greeks two and a half millennia later, as Socrates commented: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, show contempt for authority; know no respect for the old and prefer chitchat to exercising.” When the youth claimed a culture of their own in the 1960s, there was a particularly spirited conflict between the generations, which brings us back to the Rolling Stones’ so very apt take. Their refrain states, once and for all, that nobody wants to hear yesterday’s news. The following line, however, asks “Who wants yesterday’s girl?” – which sounds both harsh and condescending. Perhaps, in matters of love, a little more tolerance might be called for. Because in real life, sometimes that “new girl” just never gets old.

Born in the Austrian city of Linz in 1971, Stefan Kutzenberger now lives in Vienna, where he works as a writer and literary critic. In his latest novel, Jokerman (2020) he describes a mysterious conspiracy to overthrow Donald Trump based on a Bob Dylan song.