I’m imagining a chat with a Millennial-Zoomer pally about the Tudor exhibit at the current Metropolitan Museum. (The actual title is “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Rennaissance England.”) Since ’15 or thereabouts this fellow has seen features, plays and cable series set in the 19th and 18th Centuries as well as Elizabethan England, including Netflix’s Bridgerton, Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots, Lynsey Miller and Eve Hedderwick Turner‘s Anne Boleyn, B’way’s Hamilton, Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (set well before Elizabethan times) and so on. The casting of all these productions reflect the woke aesthetic known as “presentism”, and I’m telling this dude, who’ll be visiting the Met this weekend, that “The Tudors” doesn’t do the presentism thing because the paintings were actually painted back in the day. And this dude is looking at me going “wait…what do you mean?”