Consider also the long and bountiful history of Chinese painting, in which[...] scholar-artists frequently demonstrated their erudition by painting in explicit homage to masters from the past. For these literati painters, what mattered more than technical skill or aesthetic progression was an artist's spontaneous creativity as channeled through previous masterpieces. There's a painting I love in the Palace Museum in Beijing by Zhao Mengfu, a prince and scholar working during the Yuan dynasty, that dates to around 1310 but incorporates styles from several other periods. Spartan trees, whose branches hook like crab claws, derive from Song examples a few centuries earlier. A clump of bamboo in the corner coheres through strict, tight brushwork pioneered by the Han dynasty a thousand years before. Alongside the trees and rocks the artist added an inscription:
The rocks are like flying-white, the trees are like seal script,
[...]
Only when one masters this secret
Will he understand that calligraphy and painting have always been one.
[...] He was sublimating styles, some from the recent past and some of great antiquity, into a series of recombinatory elements that an artist of his time could deploy in concert. [...] Without ever worrying about novelty, you could still speak directly to your time. You could express your tenderest feelings, or face up to the upheavals of your age, in the overlapping styles of artists long dead.
[...] If the arts are to matter in the 21st century, we must still believe that they can collectively manifest our lives and feelings: that they can constitute a Geistgeschichte, or "history of spirit," as the German idealists used to say. This was entirely possible before modernism, and it is possible after. [...]
[...] Surely it would be healthier — and who knows what might flower — if we accepted and even embraced the end of stylistic progress, and at last took seriously the digital present we are disavowing. [...] Culture is stuck? Progress is dead? I died a hundred times, a poet once said, and kept singing.
Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill - The New York Times (nytimes.com)