What recent art (last ~20 years) will be well known in 500 years?

Does photojournalism count as art? I'd say it's a relatively safe bet that some photos of the Twin Towers on 9/11 will still be very recognisable in several centuries.

It will be obscure and niche historical curiosity that only people researching the period will know in depth, though in their own interpretation like "The 1990's aesthetic". Its far more likely, entire centuries will be culturally compressed into future equivalent of "Middle Ages" and given broad-stroke popculture treatment that will distill major 'art' into modern form that masses will consume as cultural product(like e.g. Medieval European fantasy genre) in form of pseudo-historical entertainment. What will likely survive longest is factual/historical/technical documents that have some mundane utility or significance(treaties/manuals/licenses) as long as civilization stands. Art on the other hand is subjective and tastes/preferences often change with new generations forming new art. "Classics" survive largely due institutions promoting their use and will become more obscure without state support. We have this assumption that "current culture" is valuable forever but same could be said of all past cultural period, that were replaced by "current year culture": given that technological progress allows easier culture creation it would be highly likely a single person in a future would generate equivalent of "entire classical culture" tailor-made for his taste by AI or something similar in a minute, without the need to study or even know about its existence.

If I had to put money on a longbet that in all likelihood I won't live to see the outcome of, it would be anything Marvel or Disney ( with fragments of the Star Wars franchise being most likely ). Has enough global appeal and likely to have the necessary persistence.

Edit: Any religious text with sufficient population: Qu'ran, Bible, Torah, etc.

Edit 2: I realized only in the last 20 years. In that case, I stand by my original statement.

Hard to say 500 years out. 500 years ago takes us to before Bach's time. If we instead focus on the next 100 or so years:

- The Ministry for The Future, Kim Stanley Robinson (might be seen as an important historical marker of the spread of knowledge about climate change.)

- On the Nature of Daylight, by Max Richter?

- Coco (Pixar Film.)

- The Intouchables (Film)

- Possibly some of Brother Ali's recent discography? (Not sure if will be well known, but I predict a long shelf-life.)

What will be known in 500yr will only be stuff of very major importance will be art that seeks to document or memorialize the most important events of our time.

What art do we have that's still widely known from the 1500s?

Well, outside of Mona Lisa and the works of Shakespeare the general Western public is probably only going to recognize depictions of the key players and events of the time. The official portrait of Henry VIII, depictions of Luther, the Spanish armada, the Spanish conquest of the new world, stuff like that.

With respect to purely creative works, e.g. Shakespeare, that was just high quality pop culture art of the time. They didn't know it would stand the test of time. Only looking back generations later was the influential art of the renaissance identifiable.

Even when it comes to current events most stuff that is of major "will be known in centuries" importance we don't yet know is of major importance and will not be identifiable as such until later.

Pikachu and other popular pokemon. Some superheros. Mcdonalds logo. Basically the list of the world's biggest IPs.

I'm convinced the vast majority of humanity's cultural output over the last 100 years will be permanently lost to time within the next hundred, due to most of it being stored in ephemeral digital form. The likelihood of the partial or total collapse of technological civilization, infrastructure and knowledge transfer following the pending collapse of our biosphere is simply too great, and that chain of infrastructure and education is necessary to keep copying and updating all of that digital information from generation to generation, and maintaining a cultural awareness of the necessary software and media used. Unlike the Rosetta stone, you can't just look at an SSD drive and glean language from it.

What will remain is plastic - toys and garbage. Maybe future archaeologists will think our anime figurines were ceremonial fetish objects.

I'd say, almost none of it, and just as likely to be something that isnt recognized as art today.

Even the greats came within a whisker of obscurity, eg Bach was all but forgotten for a hundred years until Mendelssohn fought for his music to be unearthed and performed.

And to my second point, museums are full of ephemera that was disregarded in its lifetime but now tells us what we think is a lot about the time then. Roman trash and Victorian hairbrushes. What survives might not and hqve never been labelled "art"

And then you have the massive problem of digital rot. i can barely read my CDs from 20 years ago. Now we don't own our digital assets so much as pay for them to stay alive in an S3 bucket. When we pass, and stop paying, they will disappear. Like tears in the rain.

Statue of Unity - India might still be around

I imagine physically indestructible city art. I don't know when the famous bull on wall street was made but something like that

In 500 years we'll all be living in a VR world populated by AI agents, watching movies and playing games generated by AI specifically for our personal tastes. Content from this era will likely be mined and used as seeds for AI-generated content. So, in a sense, all of it.

Mario Brothers as a collection of work, if I may interpret your “~” loosely.

Minecraft?

If you'd let me go 25 years... Titanic might make it.

Architecture? Might depend on what's still standing in 500 years.

Right on the edge of ~20 years but Matrix.

Columbo will be to TV what Sherlock Holmes is to literature. The last episode just makes the cut for 20 years.

Maybe some sort of reconstruction of peoples lives recorded through social media, email, pictures, etc, etc.

it's impossible to predict because actually what art is known in a timeframe changes depending on the taste not on the art itself. so your question is "what taste is common to humanity and did not change for 500 years". maybe porn? if it was considered art

You tryna mint an NFT or something?

Basquiat. A few of his paintings will be representative of the grungy NYC living experience.

Definitely a handful of memes. Idk which ones but they’ll be historic.

Perhaps Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings.

Banksy probably

Yayoi Kusama

Bandon Dunes Golf Resort

Meme paintings (see michaelernestart on Etsy)

Steely Dan

Elon Musk will get turned into art and will be the main thing remembered from this time. He's going to succeed in building his city on Mars, and multiplanetary life will be the basic reality of people in 500 years. They'll wonder how their reality started, and it'll be perfectly clear it was Elon and his singular genius.

Elon is such a weird person that it's ridiculously easy to turn him into a character in a story, which people do all the time already, right now, with great abandon, even though Elon's a contemporary figure where you can go to one of his talks and see him in person if you want. People in 500 years will have fully turned him into a fantasy hero out of stories, especially if he dies in some way that will complete the pattern in people's heads of the self-sacrificing powerful slave (really really hope that doesn't happen to him).

Lots of his talks are up on Youtube, and he's amazingly transparent, he puts it right out there what he's doing and then delivers mind-bending tech. The Tesla Battery Day presentation in 2020 blew my freakin' mind, stuff like rearrangement of basic industrial processes like nickel refining, or the laser focus on scalability, capital requirements, speed, automation, the correctly-chosen goal of reaching a scale that can alter climate change.

Then people immediately make enormously confident statements about him that are the opposite of true, because they ignorantly think he's a joke because he's such a weird guy plus an actual well-meaning person.

I've never spotted Elon Musk telling a lie, and the stuff he says is consistently seriously insightful and on-point. In fact Elon seems to me to be the only person on Earth who's acting fully rationally. The stuff he does makes sense _all the way down_, where somebody like Barack was acting very rationally but was hemmed-in by the nature of his position as president, where his power to do the right thing was constrained by e.g. the Senate. Elon consistently goes along doing the right thing, not "the right thing" in the usual sense where the person's doing the best they can considering their circumstances, but objectively The Right Thing.

I had never seen or heard tell of anything like Elon Musk before I started noticing him in about 2014, and I'm 50, well-read, traveled, overeducated, keep a sharp eye on current events, try all the time to understand the world around me. I bitterly regret not going down to Texas for the Starship presentation in 2019. Turned out it was de facto open to the public because Boca Chica Village residents could come. It would've been awesome to be there on that windy night on the coast of Texas, with a small group of people listening to Elon, with a mockup Starship right behind him, and Tim Dodd got a cool little interview afterward. Fortunately it's all up on Youtube; but I prefer to go be at historic events in person whenever possible.

It's an interesting art to spot important things unfolding and get there in time, a real-world substantive sport. Predicting what art will be remembered in 500 years is interesting; judging what art from the past was significant is interesting; but judging reality in realtime well enough to show up yourself in person in time to be in on a historic event, to meet a person who is right now doing the significant thing, that I would say is the most interesting of all. Short of, of course, _being_ the person doing the historically-significant thing.