@RusA That's quite true. Back in the early 1800s, the composer Felix Mendelssohn started championing the music of a rather obscure Baroque-era composer who wrote his music about a century and a half earlier, and whose work practically nobody was listening to. That composer's name was Johann Sebastian Bach, whose work today is considered foundational to nearly all Western concert music, largely thanks to Mendelssohn getting people to give him a listen.
There's lately been a revival of one of Bach's contemporaries, one John Hebden, whose name, in all my musical education and experience, I never heard even once until just a few years ago. As far as I can tell, his music isn't considered as influential as Bach's (and there's very little of it surviving after 400 years of obscurity), but it's nevertheless quite as good as some of his other contemporaries.
The opposite of this is an artist, actor, or other performer who gets very popular in his time, but then a few decades later he's all but forgotten. One of the problems I have watching old episodes of Johnny Carson's talk show, is that in his monologue he mentions a lot of public figures, politicians, and entertainers, who were clearly well-known at the time, but whom I have to look up to see who they were and what's so funny about them. For every Picasso, there are a dozen artists like Gleizes (who?). And since Rowling is contemporary with us, and still very much alive, it would be interesting to see if anyone is still reading Harry Potter books 100 years from now.
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@RusA That's quite true. Back in the early 1800s, the composer Felix Mendelssohn started championing the music of a rather obscure Baroque-era composer who wrote his music about a century and a half earlier, and whose work practically nobody was listening to. That composer's name was Johann Sebastian Bach, whose work today is considered foundational to nearly all Western concert music, largely thanks to Mendelssohn getting people to give him a listen.
There's lately been a revival of one of Bach's contemporaries, one John Hebden, whose name, in all my musical education and experience, I never heard even once until just a few years ago. As far as I can tell, his music isn't considered as influential as Bach's (and there's very little of it surviving after 400 years of obscurity), but it's nevertheless quite as good as some of his other contemporaries.
The opposite of this is an artist, actor, or other performer who gets very popular in his time, but then a few decades later he's all but forgotten. One of the problems I have watching old episodes of Johnny Carson's talk show, is that in his monologue he mentions a lot of public figures, politicians, and entertainers, who were clearly well-known at the time, but whom I have to look up to see who they were and what's so funny about them. For every Picasso, there are a dozen artists like Gleizes (who?). And since Rowling is contemporary with us, and still very much alive, it would be interesting to see if anyone is still reading Harry Potter books 100 years from now.