In the comments thread to my post on [Charlie Brown, advertising, and whatever comes after postmodernism](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/charlie-brown-postmodern), 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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQHPYelqr0E), not embeddable). It’s fantastic and won’t make a lick of sense to anyone who didn’t use YouTube from 2004 to 2008.