THIS summer’s holidays were spent, well, mostly in the past. There was the theatre trip to see a revival of Martin McDonagh’s play The Lonesome West at the Tron in Glasgow. I caught a lot of movies including Star Trek Beyond, Ghostbusters and The Legend of Tarzan. I sat down and watched a couple of arts documentaries on the BBC, one about Georgia O’Keefe and one under the Arena label about British pop culture in 1966 based on Jon Savage’s book of the same name. I listened to old records on 6Music and old CDs on the car stereo and bought a couple of Michelangelo Antonioni films on DVD. Apart from time reading Richard Ford’s novel Canada, a mere four years old, my cultural life for the last couple of weeks was totally spent in the 20th century.

This is, I accept, all my own fault. I’m clearly of an age now where I am looking back more than looking ahead. And yet I think it’s fair to say that to some degree that the culture is too. Look at that list of films again. Reboots of previous successes, tweaked by gender here, by historical revisionism there. It’s a bit rich, I realise, for someone whose last appearance in these pages was to talk about David Bowie, but there’s a sense that contemporary culture these days is often curatorial. Even our music festivals are headlined by heritage bands (the Stone Roses at T in the Park springs to mind).

It is – to put a made-up label on it – the BBC4 effect. In an era in which almost anything (we don’t quite have room on this page to truly explore late capitalism’s myth of choice or the limited budget of the BBC’s best channel) is only ever a mouse click away, we are as enthralled by the riches of the past as the pleasures of the present.

Perhaps this is all just a reflection of a contemporary cultural conservatism that stretches from producers to audiences, most obviously at work in film which so often relies on audience recognition to get people into the cinema these days. Hence the superhero reboots and old TV or film franchises revived. It’s not just happening at Cineworld. In the arthouse sector – setting aside the fact that Nicolas Winding Refn’s execrable The Neon Demon is a lamentably failed attempt to channel the unheimlichness of David Lynch – we can look forward to the prospect of Italian director Luca Guadagnino remaking Italian horror classic Suspiria, starring Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson.

It’s at work in films, on TV (watch out for Kevin Bishop as Norman Stanley Fletcher's grandson in a remake of Ronnie Barker's classic sitcom Porridge), in music (in everything from 80s revival festivals to indie acts playing their old albums live), and in literature (another Harry Potter book? Well since you ask.)

The thought struck me watching the Arena film – an hour of found footage detailing the artistic happenings of 1966 from the Beatles to the nuclear bomb – that 50 years from now it might be difficult to excavate something similar from today’s film and TV coverage of the arts. Because there is so little coverage of the arts on TV these days, and so much of it is backward-looking. One of the thrilling moments in the Savage film was a sequence featuring the wonderful artist Pauline Boty, whose name is not as well-known as it should be mostly because she died tragically young and maybe, too, because she was a woman. Will there be similar footage of, say, Anya Gallaccio or Lynette Yiadom-Boakye to draw on 50 years from now?

So one of the reasons to embrace cultural markers like the Booker Prize longlist, announced earlier this week, is because it’s engaged with what’s happening now. Even if, as ever, it’s a list that includes more historical novels than is surely healthy. And no James Kelman.

In the 1960s the culture was youthful, forward looking, concerned with what was next. There’s a danger in the 21st century that the baby boomers are still in charge and are more concerned with their Grateful Dead box sets than finding the next big thing.

As Edinburgh will no doubt remind us over the next month, the best place to find new voices is on stage. The best things I’ve seen this year – Kathryn Joseph singing in Kirkcaldy and William Letford reciting his poetry in Linlithgow – were thrilling because both carried the shock of the new with them. Even at my advancing age I can get excited about things I’ve not seen nor heard before.

Oh and have you heard Ben Chatwin’s new electronic album Heat & Entropy? It comes recommended by both myself and my daughter.