Next month is the 50th anniversary of two cultural icons of the 1950s: “On the Road” was published, and “West Side Story” opened on Broadway.

“On the Road,” Jack Kerouac’s stream‑of‑consciousness novel about drifting, drinking and jazz, still sells 100,000 copies a year. Productions of “West Side Story” are ubiquitous.

In the myth that has been created to assure us we must be living in the culturally most exciting of times, the 1950s are generally portrayed as dull, unadventurous and unimportant, except for the first stirrings of rock ‘n’ roll.

Maybe small‑town America was asleep then, but her urban artists weren’t. The 1950s were a peak time for the American arts. In the years following our country’s emergence as a superpower after World War II, we produced advances in music, theater, literature, painting and dance we never equaled, before or after. In music, jazz burst into bebop, stretching the musical language in previously undreamed‑of directions, while in the concert hall, works by the pioneering Charles Ives at last were allowed to enter, and to influence, a new generation of composers. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams arrived on the theater scene to tell us more about ourselves than some wanted to know, and the musical, born as cheap entertainment, attained maturity.

Jackson Pollock decided to drip paint on canvases and helped spark the brazen new aesthetic of abstract expressionism. George Balanchine reinvented European ballet with new, sharp, American accents, while Martha Graham took modern dance technique to its furthest reaches. The “beats”–Kerouac among them, but also including the poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso ‑ emulated jazz in the written word and spun whole new galaxies of experience.

For invention and innovation, no other time in our country's artistic history even touches the era from 1946 to 1963. The key, I think, was fearless experimentation. Kerouac wrote “On the Road” on a 120‑foot scroll, so as not to interrupt the flow of his thought with changing sheets of paper in the typewriter. (The act prompted Truman Capote's bitchy comment, “that's not writing, that's typing.”) Scoring “West Side Story,” Leonard Bernstein chose to employ harmonies never before heard on Broadway or in popular music. He would later tell Rolling Stone magazine:

“Everyone told us that (“West Side Story”) was an impossible project ... no one, we were told, was going to be able to sing augmented fourths, as with ‘Ma‑RI‑a’ ¼ Also, they said the score was too rangy for pop music ... Besides, who wanted to see a show in which the first‑act curtain comes down on two dead bodies lying on the stage?”

Fifty years later, the augmented fourth (from C to F‑sharp, for example) is everywhere in popular music, and so is every other possible interval, but what do all those notes add up to? Writers who want to do stream‑of‑consciousness have limitless pixels on their computer screens with which to do it, but what will they write? Painters have long since embraced abstraction and rejected it, only to flounder about, wondering what to do next. Dance seems stymied–where to go after Balanchine/Graham? Or is concert dance even relevant in a hip‑hop world? The theater is largely Disneyfied, and unless I’m missing something, poetry hasn’t had a new hero in decades.

Everything’s been done–that’s the feeling. There’s no place to go, nothing new to know. There are no walls to break down because they’ve already been tumbled. Give up. All the good stuff’s in the past.

That’s what they always say–whoever “they” are. I’m sure that Kerouac and Bernstein heard it often.

Artists still innovate and experiment, but they tend not to be the artists who get attention from the mainstream media. One example: Songwriter Jason Robert Brown’s bookless, two‑person musical, “The Last Five Years.” In‑the‑know theater folk are aware of the show–it received three Phoenix‑area productions in the last two seasons alone–but the majority of theatergoers have never heard of it. By rights, it should be as well known as “West Side Story.”

Artists still want to punch holes in the barriers that keep us from ourselves. Thanks largely to pop culture clutter, it’s just a lot harder now, 50 years after “On the Road” and “West Side Story,” to know who these artists are, and where to find the work they are doing to free us.