Looking at the glorious grocery store advertisements in this photo of John Cage from the poster for Nam June Paik’s A Tribute to John Cage, I remembered something my friend the photographer Clayton Cubitt once tweeted:
I think about this all the time, now. (I wrote more about it in a previous post on pack rats and collecting.) What you try to crop out and hide now might eventually be what people will want to see.
The trouble is that it’s hard to predict what will be interesting, and a lot of what will eventually be interesting will be saved on accident, because somebody didn’t bother to throw something out, or it got lost, or it was buried somewhere. (Archeologists love uncovering garbage dumps, for example.)
“Look at this,” says the villain Belloq to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. “It’s worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless.”
