Time & Perspective Quote by George P. Baker

Culture never resets; it revises. Baker is laying out a baton-pass theory of art history that feels almost clinical in its confidence: the past supplies the measuring stick, the present tests it under pressure, and the next generation inherits a tool that has been subtly re-forged. The line’s quiet provocation is that “standards” aren’t eternal truths sitting above taste. They’re working agreements, produced by institutions, canons, classrooms, critics, and—crucially—by artists who either comply with those agreements or break them so effectively that the break becomes the new rule.

Baker wrote as American theater was trying to professionalize, with Harvard and other universities treating drama not as low entertainment but as a serious craft with teachable principles. That context matters: the quote reads like a mission statement for a field building its authority. When he says the “practice of present-day dramatists” shapes standards, he’s defending craft over mere reverence. You don’t honor Shakespeare by imitating him; you honor him by using his lessons to make something that forces new lessons into existence.

The subtext is a gentle warning to both camps: traditionalists who weaponize the past to freeze innovation, and avant-gardists who pretend they can create without inheritance. Baker’s “broader standards” signals expansion, not demolition. Progress here isn’t a clean break; it’s an accumulation of successful experiments, smuggled into the canon under the guise of technique.