The Millennium 100: Our favorite pop culture moments from the first 20 (pretty extraordinary!) years
It is a work of art that, in retrospect, reads like a harbinger of TikTok.
Christian Marclay’s 2010 work “The Clock” was an obsessive, 24-hour montage of film and TV clips that centered on clocks and the passage of time and was always screened in a way that mirrored real time. When it is noon in the film, it is also noon in the theater.
“It is like a history of film for our ADD times,” wrote art critic Roberta Smith, when the work first appeared in the U.S. at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery in 2011.
“The Clock” embodies the essence of remix culture — taking small snippets of cultural production and reassembling them into something new, something greater than the sum of its parts.
It was also prescient, anticipating a moment in which services such as Vine (established in 2012) and TikTok (which landed in the U.S. in 2017) would allow anyone with a smartphone to make their own supercuts.
AdvertisementMarclay’s smash meditation on the nature of time remains unmatched, however. At least for now.— Carolina A. Miranda
