History has taught us that it takes at least a generation before it is possible to determine how well an artist or a writer will manage to stand the test of time.

To be on the really safe side one should, according to some, even wait a full century before trying to speak with certainty about what kind of culture has the necessary qualities to survive, and which pictorial art, literary and musical works will just become a concern for archivists and museum magazines.

We also know that even several hundred years after, revaluations are made. Shakespeare’s differing fortunes before and after romanticism are examples. Another is the planet's most famous painting: Leonardo's Mona Lisa. It was virtually unknown when it was rediscovered by the symbolists at the end of the 1800s (and was not really known until after the theft from the Louvre in 1911). Similarly, one could, in the middle of the 1800s, pay more for a painting by Marcus Larsson than ...