Preserved art always represents very specific, very narrow slices of life. Ignoring aesthetic choices by artists themselves, it starts with who can afford to c

Preserved art always represents very specific, very narrow slices of life. Ignoring aesthetic choices by artists themselves, it starts with who can afford to collect and preserve the work, and what their tastes are, and then gets filtered through moral and political fashions decade after decade. It’s a boon to find work that escaped those factors and somehow got preserved anyway, like the graffiti in Pompeii, but it’s the exception by a mile. You can’t expect to get the complete picture of a past culture just through it’s surviving art.