Graffiti Archeology

well, it's come to this. Archeology is underway to unearth the 70s, in the form of the careful preservation of a spontaneous (incomplete?) graffiti wall in SoHo. The overbearing praise and subculture aesthetic of the whole project leads be to beleive that our notions of the historical and valuable have entered terminal decline. Not in the high/low sense, but rather it seems noone thinks they are making history any more. Most anything can become subject to historical preservation it seems (including what may have been the derivative/equivalent of a sketchpad for a few graf artists), and the need to intensely document and memorialize the immediate past (very immediate; check the 6 month-ish turnaround on WTC memorial designs) both suggest a feeling of genuine disempowerment. Each act of preservation becomes vicarious participation in 'real' historical events, cordoned off by the end of history. Could we even imagine a museum dedicated to the act of preserving other art? Disempowerment of many kinds is a economic fact in flexible accumulation, but we may need new terms to gauge our real power after the past disappears under glass.