The ObserverCultureWhich cultural creations from the 21st century will stand the test of time?
Is the Black Eyed Peas' 'I Gotta Feeling' a future classic? Will we still be watching The Office in 2111? Our critics and writers offer their tips for posterityWhich cultural artefacts created since 2000 will endure and speak to future generations? That was the question the American online magazine Slate posed to their contributors earlier this month, and the list of books, films, songs, TV shows, photographs and ideas they nominated – some great, others representative of their time or merely ubiquitous – made fascinating reading. It got us wondering: what kind of selection would experts on this side of the Atlantic come up with? We asked our critics to name their "new classics" of the millennium so far, and here is what they picked. KF
Film
Slate chose: Mulholland Drive (2001), dir. David Lynch.
We choose: The Artist (2011), dir. Michel Hazanavicius. The Artist is a silent movie about the film industry's conversion to sound, a comedy in the form of a melodrama. In short, it's a complex, postmodern 21st-century masterwork. PF
Music
Slate chose: "I Gotta Feeling", Black Eyed Peas.
We choose: "Intro", the xx."Intro" must be the most ubiquitous piece of music of our times. Its minimal melancholy has been deployed as incidental music for missed goals, pensive dramas and so on, ad infinitum. Ubiquity hasn't cheapened its allure. KE
Books
Slate chose: Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon
We choose: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. The Chilean writer's final work is forbiddingly long, contains a bewildering number of characters, and has a fiendish plot. Yet even if it's a magnificent failure, it is still the most disturbingly original novel of the early 21st century. WS
Photography
Slate chose: Marlboro Marine by Luis Sinco.
We choose: The Hooded Man, photographer unknown.Taken not by a professional war photographer, but by a US soldier in Abu Ghraib on a cheap digital camera, it haunts the collective imagination like no other recent photograph. It is a snapshot of horror and abjection. SO'H
TV
Slate chose: The Wire
We choose: The Office. What was invented/winningly reinvented/ouvred/born in the past ten years, and will last? Infuriatingly hard to choose, and it's interesting that Slate chose The Wire, because my first instinct was bleak bewitching subtitled Scando-crimes (Wallander, The Killing) which have darkened and delighted our dreams and our Saturdays. In the end, though, tThe docu-comedy – okay, there was earlier Seinfeld, and Spinal Tap, but that's two in 20 years – has had the decade in thrall, from The Office (2001) right up to Gervais's latest, and the winningly deadpan Twenty Twelve, which savaged the Olympic furore with such nuance and truth when lesser minds (mine) would have used a sturdy boot. The format will become, sadly, overdone, but it's here to stay, and the best of them will still make us spray tea out of our noses. EF
Technology
Slate chose: The iPod.
We choose: Wikipedia. Who would have predicted that a wiki (a web site that can be edited – by anyone – in a browser window) would become the world's greatest reference work? And yet it's happened. Wikipedia is currently available in 270 languages and has become the default reference site for general use. The English version has nearly 3.8 million articles and 25.5 million pages which have been subjected to 500 million separate edits. It has 15.7 million registered users, 82,000 active contributors and ranks fifth in Alexa.com's list of the world's top web sites. It's always been controversial, partly because many people can't accept that something authoritative and useful could be created by a virtual hive of amateurs (i.e. people who do it for the love of it), but it has gradually been relegating paper-based encyclopedias to the dustbin of history or the shelves of antiquarian book dealers. Future generations will wonder how we ever did without it. JN
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