In this essay, Hans Abbing argues that cultural pessimism must be regarded primarily as the opposition of the established elite to the rise of a new cultural establishment. He is referring here to the new generations of artists, policy-makers and art consumers, in the non-Western as well as the Western world. The old elite’s cries for the preservation and dissemination of its classics are disingenuous, since for generations that same elite deliberately kept the high arts in social isolation, not in the last place with precepts governing the formal ‘consumption’ of art. In Abbing’s view, it is necessary and indeed inevitable to give up our opposition to the dynamics of our culture and to embrace the way it is changing, because the interaction between young and old, Western and non-Western, sheds new light on our own classics and introduces us to new masterpieces from other cultures.