Voltaire tells this story about change and decline:

Art is self destructive, at least under contemporary conditions, because artists often reject the past to create something new. It can be said that culture and cultural styles – abstract expressionism, punk rock, ragtime – eventually do fail and the explanation may be (in the spirit of Voltaire's account) that cultural producers and the public become bored with something that has existed too long. Nevertheless, some cultural forms persist longer and are more resilient than others.

Resiliency and persistence are themselves problematic. When a cultural form becomes universally accepted – such as Levi jeans, a song from a Broadway musical, or the current widespread revival of Chaplin films by third world countries and by IBM – should we not conclude that such a form has become a meaningless component of the cultural life of a period, rather than a distinctive cultural product that carries original social and symbolic meaning?