Whatever I liked as a child or teenager or somewhere in between, is far more inspiring and instructive than anything encountered recently. This is only partially a choice, actually. I trust younger me much more than I trust older me. Younger me did not have ulterior financial or political motives bending taste and aesthetics to meet some other aim.
I’m not saying culture today is not as good as it was when I was younger. In many, many cases it’s so much better, TV for example, I can barely watch the shows of my youth and I love a lot of current TV. However, old stuff has the chance to put deep roots in you. If you can get past the nostalgia and see the thing with fresh eyes (almost impossible, but one must at least try), you can start to reverse engineer it and see what made it work so well. You can also use it as a building block to create something fresh (without violating copyrights, of course).
I can't say for certain, but according to my high school English teacher, Shakespeare did not write a single original story. Not only were his stories adaptations, they were adaptations of stories his audience already knew, and knew well. Therefore, his genius was not in creating fiction, but of adapting it better than anyone else before him had. Are you familiar with any of the previous versions of Romeo and Juliet? Me neither.
And it was none but the master himself, of many trades, Da Vinci who said you should always copy when you endeavor to make art, but only copy from the old masters, never from your contemporaries.
Time is an insurmountable arbiter.
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