Reprinted Excerpt from Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (2024)

by Rochelle Gurstein, and an Interview with the Author

Abstract

Rochelle Gurstein talks to the editors about her latest book, Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024), part of which is reprinted here with her permission (Chapter 14: The Future of the Classic). In the book and the interview, the author reflects with astonishment on the many “instances of wildly fluctuating reputations” and “stunning rediscoveries of long forgotten or previously demeaned artists, lost classics, and unstable canons” which, as she writes, “put my original project of establishing the reality of a timeless classic in jeopardy, and forced me to reconsider what turned out to be a number of my own unexamined assumptions”—a book about the ephemeral classic.