Christian Caliandro: nostalgia has collapsed time into a perpetual present

In an essay on Artribune, Christian Caliandro argues that since the mid-1990s, the internet has virtualized time, erasing linear chronology and collapsing past, present, and future into a single, nostalgia-driven now. He contends that nostalgia, rather than preserving the past, adapts and neutralizes it, selecting only harmless elements. The essay references Aldo Nove's "Pulsar" (Il Saggiatore, 2024) and Isabella Santacroce's line "present and past overlapped like clothes on a bed." Caliandro, a contemporary art historian teaching at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze and a member of the scientific committee of Symbola Foundation, traces the disappearance of cultural movements and subcultures after the 1990s, attributing it to the dematerialization of cultural experience—music as pure digital files, loss of physical context. He notes that decades before the 1990s had distinct stylistic identities, but from the 2000s onward, time became blurred. The essay is part of a series on "frayed art" and nostalgia.