Every year when the Turner Prize shortlist is announced, when a giant museum retrospective is announced, or when a major award in the literary world finds its recipient, an inevitable question comes to the agenda: Will these works be able to find a place for themselves in the canon of the future?
So, what exactly is the canon—this most majestic, yet equally invisible court of art and culture history? By whom is it constructed, does it change over time, and how does a work of art attain the status of a “classic”?
Two Great Pillars of Being a “Classic”: Institutional Approval and Time
A work becoming timeless and turning into a canonical “classic” basically relies on the consensus of two different sources: institutional approval and the ruthless test of time.
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Institutional Approval: Encompasses being selected for permanent museum collections, entering textbooks, receiving prestigious awards, and the shared consensus of the dominant critics of the period. However, this approval inevitably carries the stamp of the aesthetic preferences of a specific era, geography, and class.
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The Test of Time: Time, on the other hand, is a much more impartial and mysterious judge. Works that survive in social memory, that are re-read in every new generation and open doors to different interpretations, resist time.
Sometimes, works declared “masterpieces” by institutions are forgotten on the dusty shelves of history, while marginal practices ignored by institutions pass the test of time and take center stage. At the point where these two sources overlap, that unshakable “strong canon” is born.
Harold Bloom’s Paradox: “Enduring Strangeness”
American literary critic Harold Bloom, in his famous work The Western Canon (1994), argues that the core element forming the canon is “strangeness” (enduring strangeness). According to Bloom, what enables a work to transcend ages is that radical originality breaking the conventional aesthetic molds of the period and creating an initially unsettling shock in the viewer/reader.
However, the fact that women, geographies with colonial histories, and non-Western traditions remain marginal in the list constructed by Bloom highlights the most fragile point of the canon debate. While this contradiction does not completely refute Bloom’s argument of “originality,” it makes it imperative to ask whose voice we are actually hearing when a canon is constructed.
Shifting Axes: The Canon Is Not Fixed, It Is a Dynamic Text
The canon is not a frozen museum display case; on the contrary, it is a living process actively written, erased, and reconstructed. Striking examples exist throughout art history showing how this axis has shifted:
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Japanese Ukiyo-e Prints: While seen as craft and unable to find a place in Western-centric museum canons at the beginning of the 20th century, today they are considered one of the most vital turning points in global art history.
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Frida Kahlo: While considered a figure in the shadow of Diego Rivera during her lifetime, decades after her death she transformed into one of the most powerful names of the contemporary canon alongside debates in feminist theory and identity politics.
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Turner Prize Radicalism: Born against the habit of Tate and British art institutions rewarding traditional canvas painting in the 1980s, the Turner Prize itself was conceived as an alternative power intervening in the canon.
Whether the “game-changing” practices we see today in the Turner Prize 2026 shortlist—such as Simeon Barclay’s spoken-musical performances or Marguerite Humeau’s speculative ecological installations—will enter the canon will depend not on the momentary grace of institutions, but on how well these works foresaw the future decades later.
A List at the Center of Power Politics
Ultimately, the canon is purely a matter of power, representation, and resource allocation. Declaring a work or an artist canonical means that institutional resources are directed straight there: museums allocate massive budgets to purchase those works, researchers write dissertations on them, students study those texts, and the press dedicates pages to them.
Productions that remain outside this massive mechanism, no matter how refined they are, are condemned to invisibility. Breaking this cycle is slow; however, thanks to alternative awards, independent critical outlets, feminist and post-colonial readings, the boundaries of the canon constantly expand and its perspective shifts.
NO-26 Editor’s Attic Note
Aura: Intellectual, questioning, and eye-opening.
The canon is not a fixed list completed in the past and put on the shelf; it is a living space of debate that we negotiate anew every day. When evaluating Turner Prize shortlists, museum acquisitions, or biennale selections, the essential thing is not to make prophecies like “This work will definitely become a classic,” but to see which doors that work opens regarding today’s world and the possibilities of the future. The filter of time continues to work!
