No, art that is behind its time is art that expresses something that is already in the air but has not yet been creatively articulated. The phrase “behind its time” is not meant to disparage it. It can be just as difficult to capture a mood that already exists as it is to indulge in conjecture about possible futures. Take Elvis. He was certainly unique, and helped to define a new era. But he was never ahead of his time, he was behind it. The western teenager, exploding with hormones and buoyed by the new spirit of affluence, was waiting to be courted. Elvis or his equivalent might easily have happened a few years earlier, in another recording studio, perhaps not quite so handsomely, but just as influential. It was in the runes.
~ Peter Aspden
Reading this, I can’t help but think of the huge cultural upwelling of ecological consciousness recent years have seen, and that it’s an upwelling still in wait (to my mind) for its galvanizing story. Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben, Rachel Carson, and others have written non-fiction that changed how we think, but what work of imagination has captured both that mass desire and mass attention? Is there a story, yet, from the environmental movement that has changed how we dream, or revealed how our dreams have changed over time, and that so many of us are dreaming those new dreams already?* Maybe there’s some novel, or film, or poem, or — most likely, perhaps — some video game headed toward us right now like a comet, behind its time and ready to tell us what we already know and what we should do with that knowledge.
* Yes, I know James Cameron tried.