I live in New York City, so I've been unusually conscious lately of recycling. Because after New York eliminated most municipal trash recycling a year or two ago, we are now getting it back again--which is a good thing.

But this latest to-and-fro on the wisdom of recycling got me to thinking: maybe in the metaphorical sense, as a culture, we could manage to take a breather from our entrenched habit of recycling works of art and design and entertainment.

We've been doing it almost compulsively for 25 or 30 years now. Our culture has become one giant, state-of-the-art recycling machine. Since the mid-1970s, artists and designers and makers of entertainment have been digging out passé artifacts, pulling them apart, spiffing them up, and then reconstituting them as new works of art and design and entertainment.

In the '70s real estate developers started recycling with a vengeance, turning old buildings like train stations and warehouses and churches into shopping malls and apartment houses and nightclubs. And around the same time, not coincidentally, postmodern architects started recycling unfashionable old decorative gestures like columns and pediments and stone facades in their brand new buildings.

It's also when the art photographer Cindy Sherman started recycling imagery from movies and TV, starring herself, to create her art.

Then it became a virus.

Don't get me wrong -- a lot of this work struck me as ambitious and interesting the first half-dozen times I encountered it. I've even grown to fond of "mid-century modern" interior décor and product design.

In pop music today, there's sampling -- recycling by any other name. An apotheosis is the song "A Hard Knock Life". First in the late 1970s the creators of the musical Annie recycled a 1930s comic strip to create it in the first place. And then in the late 90s the rapper Jay-Z sampled that song from Annie to create his very different recycled hit.

But as recycling of various types and degrees has become the M.O. in art and entertainment, more and more it (like so much of the ironic impulse) has become lazy and automatic and uninteresting, born not of the original impulse to surprise and refresh, but just to fill the pipeline. Television now has hundreds of channels, and those channels need programming. So TV recycles, obsessively.

First there was Nick at Night, but now there are several entire channels of recycled third-rate reruns, TV Land and The Game Show Channel and shortly the Reality Channel.

Fashion designers started recycling early-1960s designs about 20 years ago -- and now, exactly 20 years later, they've started to recycle early-1980s designs. When you start recycling recycled things, don't you pretty soon get stuck in an endless loop? Some kind of hermetic cultural cul-de-sac?

Lets make a belated resolution for the new century: to start watching and reading and listening to fresh art and entertainment, to demand that artists and entertainers grope when they can toward originality that does more than quote and refer, that doesn't just re-use and revamp. Wouldn't it be more fun -- for us and for the artists and entertainers -- to start seeking out the shock of the new once again?

Otherwise, what are our grandchildren going to be able to recycle when they grow up and run out of fresh ideas?

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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