Sometimes, when I'm wandering in an art museum looking at the relics of an ancient civilization, I find myself wondering how a future society would represent a defunct American culture. What objects would be chosen—or would survive—to be placed on display? Would I agree with a curator's choices? Were I to choose the items that some future American Museum of Art should exhibit to represent twentieth-century American culture, here are some I would name: an tilvis Presley record; a Currier & Ives print; a movie still from Casablanca. To put it a different way, my priority would not be to exhibit fragments of an urban cathedral, a painted landscape, or a formal costume. I wouldn't deny such objects could be important artifacts of American culture, or that they belong in a gallery. But in my avowedly biased opinion, the most vivid documents of American life—the documents that embody its possibilities and limits—arc typically found in its popular culture.

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