The
Death of
Timelessness and Beyond
The topic I wish to address today is one
which, I believe, should occupy a position of central importance in
contemporary
aesthetics but which, regrettably, is almost completely neglected. The
topic is
the relationship between art and time – or, to use an equivalent
phrase, the
temporal nature of art. And in particular, I want to draw attention to
an event
of major significance that has taken place over the past century and
whose implications
for aesthetics are, in my view, very substantial indeed. That event is
the
death of the idea that art endures timelessly, an idea that has
featured
prominently in European thought and which still lingers on in certain
areas
today, despite being in its death throes. But let me begin at the
beginning and
approach my topic step by step, explaining first of all what I mean by
the relationship
between art and time – or the temporal nature of art. First, I am not referring to the function
of time within works of art – for
example, the ways in which the passing of time might be represented in
film or the
novel, or the function of time in what some writers call “temporal
arts”, such
as music or poetry. Philosophers of art do
write about these issues on occasion and I’m not necessarily suggesting
that
they have been neglected. The topic I’m addressing is of a broader
nature and relates to the nature of art generally. It concerns the external relationship between art and
time – that is, the effect of the passing of time – of history, if you
like – on
those objects, whether created in our own times or in the distant past,
that we
today call “works of art”. Which means that, for the most part, I’ll be
speaking about the well-known capacity of works of art to endure over time – to “live on”, or
“transcend time”. And, above
all, I’ll be talking about the way
they live on, the manner of their
enduring, given that, as I’ll point out shortly, something might endure
in a
number of different ways. But let me first dwell for a moment on the
idea of a work of art “living on” – or transcending time – because I
want to
stress that what’s at stake here is something very real, not some
figment of a
fevered aesthetic imagination. Let’s think about concrete examples. If
we consider
the history of literature, for instance, we know that of the thousands
of
novels published in the eighteenth century, only a tiny fraction holds
our
interest today, and that for every Tom
Jones or Les Liaisons dangereuses,
there are large numbers of works by contemporaries of Fielding and
Laclos
that have sunk into oblivion, probably permanently. And then if we go a
step
further and think about objects outside the realm of art, the point is
equally
obvious. We do not ask if a map of the world drawn by a cartographer of
the
Elizabethan era is still a reliable navigational tool, and we know that
a
ship’s captain today who relied on such a map would be very unwise. But
we
might quite sensibly ask if Shakespeare’s plays, written at the same
time the map
was drawn, is still pertinent to life today, and we might well want to
answer
yes. The map has survived as an object of what we term “historical
interest”
but it is no longer applicable to the world we live in. Shakespeare’s
plays, on
the other hand, are not just part of history; they have endured in a
way the
map has not. So, as I say, there’s something very real at stake here –
which
applies not only to literature, of course, but to art in all its forms.
One of
art’s specific characteristics, we are entitled to say, is a power to
transcend
time, and this is something our experience confirms every time we
respond to a
great work of art from the past. This characteristic is as real as any
that
aesthetics, rightly or wrongly, has traditionally ascribed to art –
such as a
capacity to represent, to give aesthetic pleasure, to respond to a
sense of
taste, and so on. If the capacity of art to transcend time is a figment
of the
imagination, those certainly would be as well. I want to make it very clear, however,
that the topic I’m addressing has nothing to do with the so-called
“test of
time” – the rather banal, and, I think, thoroughly misleading, idea
that the
value of a work of art can be judged by how long it lasts. I won’t have
time to
discuss this idea today so I’ll limit myself to stressing that my topic
is the nature of the capacity of
art to
transcend time, not some temporal test designed to separate art from
non-art.
The notion of a “test of time” is a red herring in the present context.
It would
not take us to the heart of the matter I want to examine and would
merely lead
us astray. Equally, my topic has nothing to do with
drawing
up a list of criteria intended to establish whether a work will last or
not.
Let’s suppose, for example, that someone says to me: “Look, it’s all very simple,
isn’t it? There
are certain works that (for example), offer profound insights into
human
nature, are innovative, skilfully executed, and so on. Works that have
those
attributes live on, and those don’t, don’t. So what’s your problem?”. A
statement like that would comprehensively miss the point of my
analysis. Because
even if one accepted the proposed criteria (and overlooked the obvious
questions they beg), they would not necessarily explain specifically
why art endures.
They might, equally plausibly, be answers to questions such as: Why is
one work
of art good or great, and another not? Or: Why does one work give us
“aesthetic
pleasure” (assuming one accepted that notion) and another doesn’t? And
so on.
In other words, the criteria do not self-evidently help us understand
why a
work defies or transcends
time.
And just as importantly, they throw
no light whatsoever on the vital question of how
this happens – how art transcends
time. My inquiry, in short, has nothing to do with a
catalogue of
reasons why a work might last. It concerns the nature of a particular
quality
possessed by art, namely, its power to transcend time. In
the same sense that one might ask if art is essentially a
manifestation of
beauty, or a form of representation (two questions often asked about
the nature
of art), in this instance one is asking: does art have a specific
temporal
nature, a specific way of existing through time, and if so, what is it? I make these preliminary points because very
little attention is paid to the temporal nature of art at the present
time and
I want to avoid misunderstandings. But I would certainly not want to
give the
impression that no attention has ever
been paid to the issue because that would be quite wrong. Once we
reflect for a
moment, we quickly see that the question of art’s relationship with
time has a
lengthy and important history in European culture – a history resting
on the
proposition that art endures because it is outside
time, exempt from time,
or in the
conventional terminology, “timeless”, “eternal”, or “immortal” – three
words
used interchangeably. This well-known idea pre-dates the birth of
aesthetics,
of course. It sprang to prominence during the Renaissance, and we need
look no
further than Shakespeare’s sonnets to see the evidence for that.[1] Art defies time, Shakespeare and many other
poets of the period
asserted, because it is immortal, eternal. The proposition is much more
than a
so-called “poet’s conceit”. Among other things, it was the
Renaissance’s answer
to a pressing question, namely, why the works of ancient Greece and
Rome still elicited
intense admiration, despite having fallen into oblivion for nearly a
thousand
years. The art of Antiquity, Renaissance minds reasoned, exemplified
the one
true style – the style of beauty – and a key attribute of beauty was
that it is
exempt from time – immortal, eternal. This belief became deeply embedded in
European consciousness and by the eighteenth century when the
foundations of
aesthetics were laid, timelessness was accepted without question as
part of the
very nature of art. David Hume argued, for example, that the function
of a
suitably prepared sense of taste was to discern that “catholic and
universal
beauty” found in all true works of art, and that the forms of beauty
thus
detected will “while the world endures…maintain their authority over
the mind
of man”, a proposition Hume supports by his well-known dictum that “The
same
Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still
admired
at Paris and London”.[2]
The same idea was endorsed by a range of eighteenth century figures
such as Gotthold
Lessing, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johann Winckelmann, Alexander Pope,[3]
and Immanuel Kant, to name just a few; and there were no dissenting
voices. The
Renaissance had laid it down that art is beauty and beauty transcends
time
because it is eternal, and Enlightenment thinkers gave that account
their complete
seal of approval. Now I’ll argue in a moment that this
explanation of how art endures is no longer viable – that, it is now
untenable
and useless. But before doing so, I’d like to reflect a little on the
significance
of this traditional explanation. First, we should recognise, I think, that
the proposition that art is timeless at least provided a complete
answer to the question of how art endures. I stress this
point because it is crucial to recognise that, in principle, something
– a work
of art, for instance – might endure in a variety
of ways. It might, for example, endure for a certain
period, then disappear
definitively into oblivion. Or it might endure for a time, disappear,
and then
return – in a cyclical way. Or it might endure timelessly – the
alternative we are
discussing – where it is exempt from time. And, as we’ll see shortly,
there’s at
least one other possible option. So, by
itself, a recognition that art endures, important though that
is as a first
step, leaves us with a major, unanswered question, an explanatory gap. How, we need to know, does art endure?
Or to put that another way: What does enduring mean
in the case of art? Now, the claim that art is timeless provided
an answer to that. Art endures, it said, not simply because it persists
in time
in some unknown, unspecified way, but because it is
impervious to time, “time-less”, unaffected by the passing
parade
of history, its meaning and value always remaining the same, or In
Hume’s
words, “while the world endures…[maintaining its authority] over the
mind of
man”. So whatever one may think about this solution – and, as I say, I
think it
has ceased to be tenable – it was at least a complete solution. It
didn’t just
claim that art endures. It explained the manner
of the enduring, and the explanatory gap was closed. Secondly, and no less importantly, the
explanation of the temporal nature of art I’m now discussing has, as
I’ve said,
played a major part in European thought, and this influence extended to
the
origins of our own discipline of aesthetics. I’ve already mentioned
Hume and
Kant who are regarded as founding fathers of modern aesthetics and who
both
believed that art is timeless. Hence the inevitable question we need to
ask
ourselves: Can we separate the aesthetic thought of Hume, Kant and
their
contemporaries from the view that art is timeless? Is there an
Enlightenment
aesthetics that makes sense without that belief? If so, what would it
look
like? Could we substitute some other
account of the temporal nature of art, and how would that affect the
Enlightenment
explanations? I leave those questions with you for now. But if we
reject the
notion that art is timeless – and I will argue, as I said, that we
should – I
do not think they can be swept under the carpet. Thirdly, we need to ask ourselves whether
and to what extent the notion that art is timeless has left its mark on
aesthetics as we know it today. I leave aside the Continental branch of
the
discipline here, not because I think the question of art’s temporal
nature does
not affect it. Quite to the contrary, in fact. But in a paper this
length I
need to limit my scope and Continental aesthetics raises additional
issues that
I don’t have time to discuss today. But what about the Anglo-American
form of
the discipline – “analytic” aesthetics, as it is sometimes called? This
tradition, as we know, considers itself to be in a direct line of
descent from
thinkers such as Hume and Kant[4]
and the ideas they stand for. Of course, there are some differences.
Contemporary “analytic” thinkers would be much less inclined than their
eighteenth
century forebears to hold up Classical Antiquity as a timeless standard
of
beauty. But the analytic school of thought does, nonetheless, show a
marked fondness
for the idea of artistic, or aesthetic, “universals” which are said to
transcend time and place, which looks very much like a legacy of
Enlightenment
thinking. In addition, there is the characteristic, quite deliberate,
preference for an ahistorical approach to art – the claim that while
one may
admit the occasional influence of historical events, the philosophy of
art should
approach its subject matter as if it were essentially exempt from the
flow of
time and change – a view that once again looks very much like a legacy
of Enlightenment
thinking. In the end, it’s hard to say whether these tendencies imply
an
assumption that art is timeless or whether this idea has been watered
down to an
assumption that art is atemporal in some unspecified way. And since
analytic
thinkers rarely address the question, there is no real help from that
quarter.
I do think, nonetheless, that where the temporal nature of art is
concerned,
analytic aesthetics shows definite affinities with its
eighteenth-century
forerunners, even if it is not fully conscious of the fact. All this, I think you will agree, gives
added importance to the crucial issue I foreshadowed a little while ago
–
whether the belief that art is timeless is still tenable today. And
since this
is the matter I now want to consider, let me be quite clear about the
issue at
stake. We agreed earlier – or I hope we did – that art appears to
possess a
special capacity to endure – to transcend
time. The question now is: Are we still happy to subscribe to the
traditional view
that this power of transcendence operates through exemption
for change – that is, timelessly? And if we are not happy
with that, what alternative might we offer? And how might this
alternative – whatever
it might be – affect our thinking about the nature of art and about the
discipline of aesthetics? I myself believe that the view that art
is timeless ceased being credible about a century ago but that modern
aesthetics
has simply failed to notice. There are three main reasons why I think
this and I’ll
outline them now in increasing order of importance.
First, the last hundred or so years has
witnessed the progressive disintegration of the idea that art is a
manifestation of beauty – an idea which, as I mentioned, was integral
to the
traditional explanation. The notion of that art is a form of beauty
began to
lose plausibility in the early decades of the twentieth century when
the
category “art” began to encompass works very different from those in
the post-Renaissance
tradition – works such as such African and Pacific Island masks,
Pre-Columbian gods,
pre-Renaissance Western art such as the Isenheim
Altarpiece, and modern artists such as Picasso. I am of
course aware that
some contemporary advocates of the theory of beauty attempt to expand
the idea
to accommodate works such as these, but the result, its seems to me, is
a
concept of beauty so vague and lifeless that it has ceased to be of any
explanatory value. The second assault on the traditional
explanation came from the modern fascination with history – a major
focus of
nineteenth century thought and one that, in many respects, our
contemporary
world still shares. Though seldom stated plainly and simply, the threat
this
idea poses to the traditional explanation is perfectly straightforward.
If
something is understood as timeless, then essentially it is exempt from
change:
it is unaffected by the vicissitudes of time and circumstance. If art
is
timeless, it must therefore lie essentially outside
history and beyond the reach of history’s explanatory
categories. Naturally
enough, this implication is not congenial to theorists who place
history at the
centre of their thinking and
it was, unsurprisingly,
quite unacceptable to Hegel, who placed art firmly within
the ambit of history and made it the subject of a teleology
— ending, as we know, with art’s demise. And, of course, assaults on
the notion
of timelessness continued with Taine and Marx and a series of
post-Marxist
thinkers up to the present day, all of whom have declined to exempt art
from
the historical process, however conceived. Art, on the historical view
of
things, is fundamentally a creature of its times. To locate its
essential
qualities in a changeless, “eternal” realm removed from the flow of
history
would from this point of view, be an idealist illusion, false to art
and
history alike. But the third attack on the traditional
explanation seems to me the most damaging of all. The nature of this
problem
quickly becomes clear if we take account of the full
extent of the realm of art as we know it today. Art today no
longer simply means, as it did for several centuries, the works of the
post-Renaissance West plus selected works of Greece and Rome. Art
today, as
I’ve already suggested, encompasses the works of a wide range of
non-Western
cultures, many ancient civilizations, and even Palaeolithic times. And
in
addition, it includes periods of Western art itself which were
previously
regarded with indifference, such as Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic.
How
plausible does the notion of timelessness seem in the context of this
new and
vastly enlarged world of art? As we know, selected objects from
non-Western
cultures, such as Africa and Pre-Columbian Mexico, began to enter art
museums
(as distinct from historical or anthropological collections) in the
early years
of the twentieth century. Yet as we also know — even if we often tend
to forget
— the West encountered these cultures well before that, and for
centuries
regarded their artefacts as merely the botched products of unskilled
workmanship, or as heathen idols or fetishes. Moreover, in their
original
cultural settings, these objects were never regarded as “art”. Their
original
function — their raison d’être —
was
religious or ritualistic: they were “ancestor figures” housing the
spirits of
the dead, sacred images of the gods, and so on. Now, the
transformations that
have taken place over the centuries in cases such as these — from
sacred object
initially, then to heathen idol or “fetish”, and now to treasured work
of art, are
obviously very difficult to square with any notion of “timelessness” —
that is,
immunity from change. Time
and change
seem, on the contrary, to have played a very powerful role, not only in
terms
of whether or not the objects in question were considered important but
also in
terms of the kind of importance
placed on them. The world of art we know today seems, in short, far
less
beholden to a quality of timelessness than, as André Malraux has
argued, to metamorphosis and resurrection – that
is transformations
in meaning accompanied by a resuscitation from oblivion where, as often
happened, the work had lost all significance. Taken together, these three objections
seem to me to be quite fatal to the idea that art is timeless, eternal,
or
immortal, and Malraux, not surprisingly, has expressed the same view.
In a
television interview in 1975, he commented with characteristic
forcefulness
that, although the notion that art is eternal or immortal may have
seemed quite
reasonable in the past, “Today the idea of immortal beauty is simply
ridiculous”. “To talk about ‘immortal art’ today, faced with the
history of art
as we know it,” he added, “is simply hot air.” Like so much of what
Malraux
wrote and said about art, the significance of his position on this
matter has
seldom been fully appreciated. So let’s be quite clear about it. He is
saying,
quite unequivocally, that the explanation on which the West has relied
for so
long to account for the capacity of art to transcend time is no longer
viable –
that it is defunct, dead, useless. He is saying that a proposition to
which the
Renaissance was profoundly attached, that the Enlightenment founders of
aesthetics regarded as a given, and which, as I have suggested, still
lingers
on in aesthetics today, is now, to borrow his phrase, “hot air”. It is
no small
claim, is it? It is not some fine point about a minor aspect of art. It
is a
claim that goes to the heart of the way our culture has thought about
art for
half a millennium. It is a deeply revolutionary claim – and one, I
should add, that
I fully agree with. There’s more to say about Malraux’s
thinking on this topic and I’ve said nothing, for example, about the
theoretical
underpinnings of his argument and how the concept of metamorphosis
accords with
other aspects of his theory of art. But my time is running out, so I
must draw
a line here and pull my comments together with a few closing remarks. First, let me stress again that we are
talking about something very real not a figment of the imagination. The
capacity
of art to “live on” – to transcend time – is, after all, one of its
best-known
features and if one had any tendency to forget this, one would only
need
contemplate some of the countless works from the distant past that now
populate
our art museums. These works – the Victory
of Samothrace, for example, or the stern 5000- year-old
visage of the
Pharaoh Djoser, are not just historical objects like a potsherd or a
cooking
utensil. They speak to us with the same immediacy and vitality one
discovers in
a Shakespearean play or a Mozart piano concerto. They are not just
evidence of
times gone by; they are like voices speaking to us across time. But we live at a fascinating time as far
as this aspect of art is concerned. For half a millennium, as I’ve
said, the West
has agreed that art is timeless – that it lives on because it is exempt
from
time. This belief was part of a cultural heritage shared by figures as
diverse
a Shakespeare, Hume, Diderot, Kant and, though I didn’t have time to
discuss
the point, by many of the Romantics. And as I’ve suggested in this
paper, the same
idea still seems to live a subterranean existence in modern aesthetics,
influencing
the discipline’s agenda and the way issues are approached. But now,
after 500
years, this cherished idea seems to have run its course. We today are
confronted with a world of art in which, quite simply, it no longer
makes
sense. A key question this poses for us, as I’ve
suggested, is: If art is not timeless, what is
its temporal nature? How does
it transcend
time? My own answer is the same as Malraux’s: I believe art transcends
time through
a process of metamorphosis. But I want to emphasise that, whether one accepts Malraux’s answer or not,
is immaterial as far
as the significance of the question is concerned. If, for some reason,
one
rejects his answer, the question
does
not go away or become less pressing. It simply requires us to find
another
answer. But in addition to this, as I’ve
suggested, we have other, related questions to answer. To what extent
does contemporary
aesthetics, especially of the Anglo-American variety, continue to rest
on the
Enlightenment assumption that art is timeless? If it does, how do we
deal with
the fact that this assumption now seems, as Malraux puts it, “simply
ridiculous”? Further, if we happen to think that this is not
the assumption underlying Anglo-American aesthetics, what is its view about the temporal nature of
art? Does it assume that art is atemporal
in some way – that it has nothing essential to do with time? If so, how
might
it explain the manifest capacity of art to transcend time? And lastly,
how might
the agenda of aesthetics change if it adopted Malraux’s explanation of
art’s
temporal nature? Would the changes be merely superficial or would they
affect
the very foundations of the discipline? I
leave these questions with you –
perhaps to be explored a little more during our discussion. Let me just
conclude with this thought: As far back as 1935, Malraux wrote that “As well as being an object, art is also an encounter with
time”. A serious limitation of modern aesthetics, I believe, is that it
focuses almost
entirely on the object-related characteristics of art, such as
the capacity
to represent, to give "aesthetic pleasure" and so on, and has very little, if anything,
to say about art as an encounter with
time – about art’s temporal nature. If our discipline is to flourish
and remain
relevant to the world we live in, this situation, I believe, needs to
be quickly
rectified. [1] Cf. the well-known lines of Sonnet 18: But
thy eternal summer shall not fade, [2] David
Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, and other
essays, ed. J.W. Lenz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 9. [3] Cf. Pope’s An
Essay on Criticism: Hail!
bards triumphant! born in happier days; [4] More
directly, probably,
than Continental thinkers for whom names like Hegel, Marx, and
Heidegger often
play a larger role. |
This is a paper for a conference I was unfortunately not able to attend but which I hope to deliver on some future occasion. It deals with a number of ideas I discuss in more detail in my books. I want to draw attention to an event of major significance that has taken place over the past century ... That event is the death of the idea that art endures timelessly, an idea that has featured prominently in European thought and which still lingers on in certain areas today... One of art’s specific characteristics, we are entitled to say, is a power to transcend time, and this is something our experience confirms every time we respond to a great work of art from the past. This characteristic is as real as any that aesthetics, rightly or wrongly, has traditionally ascribed to art... The notion of a “test of time” is a red herring in the present context. It would not take us to the heart of the matter I want to examine and would merely lead us astray. In the same sense that one might ask if art is essentially a manifestation of beauty, or a form of representation (two questions often asked about the nature of art), in this instance one is asking: does art have a specific temporal nature, a specific way of existing through time, and if so, what is it? The Renaissance had laid it down that art is beauty and beauty transcends time because it is eternal, and Enlightenment thinkers gave that account their complete seal of approval. Can we separate the aesthetic thought of Hume, Kant and their contemporaries from the view that art is timeless? Is there an Enlightenment aesthetics that makes sense without that belief? ... where the temporal nature of art is concerned, analytic aesthetics shows definite affinities with its eighteenth-century forerunners, even if it is not fully conscious of the fact. Are we still happy to subscribe to the traditional view that this power of transcendence operates through exemption for change – that is, timelessly? And if we are not happy with that, what alternative might we offer? And how might this alternative – whatever it might be – affect our thinking about the nature of art and about the discipline of aesthetics? In a television interview in 1975, [Malraux] commented that, although the notion that art is eternal or immortal may have seemed quite reasonable in the past, “Today the idea of immortal beauty is simply ridiculous”. “To talk about ‘immortal art’ today, faced with the history of art as we know it,” he added, “is simply hot air.” [Malraux] is saying, quite unequivocally, that the explanation on which the West has relied for so long to account for the capacity of art to transcend time is no longer viable – that it is defunct, dead, useless. He is saying that a proposition to which the Renaissance was profoundly attached, that the Enlightenment founders of aesthetics regarded as a given, and which still lingers on in aesthetics today, is now, to borrow his phrase, “hot air”. It is no small claim, is it? It is not some fine point about a minor aspect of art. It is a claim that goes to the heart of the way our culture has thought about art for half a millennium. For half a millennium, the West has agreed that art is timeless – that it lives on because it is exempt from time. This belief was part of a cultural heritage shared by figures as diverse a Shakespeare, Hume, Diderot, Kant and by many of the Romantics. And the same idea still seems to live a subterranean existence in modern aesthetics, influencing the discipline’s agenda and the way issues are approached. But now this cherished idea seems to have run its course. We today are confronted with a world of art in which, quite simply, it no longer makes sense. To what extent does contemporary aesthetics, especially of the Anglo-American variety, continue to rest on the Enlightenment assumption that art is timeless? If it does, how do we deal with the fact that this assumption now seems, as Malraux puts it, “simply ridiculous”? A serious limitation of modern aesthetics, I believe, is that it focuses almost entirely on the object-related characteristics of art ... and has very little, if anything, to say about art as an encounter with time |