In the comments thread to my post on Charlie Brown, advertising, and whatever comes after postmodernism, reader Michael makes an important point:
If everything is a reference to a reference to a reference, as so much creative work is currently, then audiences are forced to either “get” everything, or else be alienated by everything. It may work in the short term for a target audience, but the work won’t hold up for long. Once the references become irrelevant, the work built on references becomes, likewise, irrelevant.
That’s the crux and the crisis: you’re creating things that won’t make sense 20 years from now. Or 20 minutes, given the speed of our culture.
Certainly there are things forged out of this postmodern, paste-it-together ethic that will last — probably because they have some artistic achievement beyond their ability to string together pop-culture references. “Single Ladies” is really well shot and performed. If you put it in a time capsule, it will still make sense, the same way Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” holds up.
But as an extreme example, consider Weezer’s deliberately memetastic “Pork and Beans” video (link, not embeddable). It’s fantastic and won’t make a lick of sense to anyone who didn’t use YouTube from 2004 to 2008.