Here Are 7 Exhibitions That Defined the Y2K Era

It is reasonable to expect that we may not remember the noughties with absolute clarity. We stumbled towards that historical horizon with a fin-de-siècle perversity made all the more dire by the rising superstitions of millennial dread. And then, with an offbeat chronological clockwork that belied the frenzy of Y2K, we hit the new century with a traumatic bang 20 months later, on September 11, 2001. It all comes back to us when we listen to decade-defining greatest hits compilations heavy on Eminen, Coldplay, Pink, Linkin Park, Black Eyed Peas, and Britney Spears. Lets not forget the memes that remind us of the advent of social media. Isn’t the very nature of cultural memory defined by the fact that first-hand experience is never so comprehensible as when it is relived through nostalgia? When I was growing up, the joke was that if you could remember the sixties you weren’t there, but this seems to be a rule of thumb for every era. Actually living it is incidental and anecdotal to the fictions of recollection. The promise of a new century is something between an extreme diet and a healthy amnesia. We can finally shed all those named decades and the...