Time & Perspective Quote by Hal Price

Hal Price is arguing for a two-track culture: creation and conservation running side by side, neither subordinated to the other. The line is plainspoken, but its insistence carries a quiet rebuke to an arts ecosystem that treats history like optional reading - a dusty annex you visit only when awards season demands a “tribute.” By saying “need,” Price frames preservation not as nostalgia or scholarly fussiness, but as infrastructure. Artforms don’t just evolve; they lose memory under the pressure of novelty, platforms, and shortened attention cycles.

The phrasing “keep the history...going” is doing extra work. History here isn’t a museum label; it’s a living practice: reissues, archives, criticism, teaching, citation, restoration, oral histories. It suggests that the past can’t be assumed to sit safely behind glass. It has to be maintained, circulated, made legible to each new generation that arrives with different tools and different blind spots. “Parallel” matters too: Price refuses the false choice between reverence and innovation. The subtext is that new work becomes thinner when it’s unmoored, and historical work becomes sterile when it isn’t in dialogue with what artists are making now.

Contextually, the quote fits a moment when algorithmic culture rewards the new, the viral, the instantly searchable, while older work becomes fragmented, paywalled, or simply forgotten. Price’s intent is practical and political: safeguarding lineage is how an artform keeps its standards, its experiments, and its hard-won lessons from being endlessly reinvented - or erased.