Time & Perspective Quote by Jonathan Miller

Miller’s line is a sly reversal of the usual modernist melodrama. We’re trained to hear “the burden of the past” as an unavoidable weight, a museum strapped to the artist’s back. He flips it: the past only becomes oppressive when you’re forced to rely on the avant-garde’s experience - when yesterday’s rebels become today’s rulebook.

The jab lands because it punctures a common cultural myth: that novelty is liberation. Miller suggests the opposite. Once the avant-garde hardens into tradition, it’s just another set of pieties you’re expected to inherit, cite, and defer to. The “experience” of the avant-garde sounds authoritative, even heroic, but he treats it like secondhand living: not your risk, not your discovery, just a borrowed posture of transgression. In that light, the past isn’t only Bach and Shakespeare; it’s also the accumulated gestures of disruption, the canon of breaking the canon.

As an entertainer with a brainy, polymath streak, Miller is also defending craft against fashion. He’s hinting that there’s a peculiar tyranny in being told that seriousness requires permanent innovation, that relevance means staying one step ahead of last year’s daring. The subtext is permission: you don’t owe your work to a timeline of progress. You owe it to the present moment - and to your own eyes and ears, not the approved memory of people who already “broke” the form for you.