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.