Why do I know the dead masters but not one living artist?

Your team can name every master who shaped your field — dates, lineages, who studied under whom. Ask who is doing the work right now, this year, in your own city, and the room goes quiet. Someone half-remembers a name from a panel, then changes the subject. This is not ignorance. It is a choice made so quietly that none of you noticed making it. The dead cannot see your unfinished draft. They cannot decline to answer your message. They cannot be better than you at the thing you are still learning. Studying them feels like devotion. It is also, quietly, the safer room. A pod exists to make the present risky again — together. Four people asking each other who is alive and working now is harder to dismiss than one person avoiding the question alone.