An intellectual revolution: André Malraux and the temporal nature of art
Very little has
been written in
recent decades about the temporal nature of art. This is a
major gap in contemporary aesthetic theory.
The two
principal
explanations provided by our Western cultural tradition are
that art
is timeless ('eternal') or that it belongs within the world
of
historical change. Neither account offers a plausible
explanation of
the world of art as we know it today, which contains large
numbers
of works which are self-evidently not timeless because they
have
been resurrected after long periods of oblivion with
significances
quite different from those which they originally held, and
which
also seem to have escaped
history because, though
long-forgotten,
they have 'come alive' again for us today.
In his two key
works on
the theory of art, Les Voix du silence and La
Métamorphose des dieux, André Malraux
offers an entirely new
account of
the temporal nature of art based on the concept of metamorphosis. Unlike
the
traditional explanations, Malraux's account allows us to make sense
of
the
world of art as we now know it. He revolutionizes our
understanding
of the relationship between art and time.
The article also considers one of the rare attempts in contemporary
'analytic' aesthetics to deal with the question
of art
and time (Jerrold Levinson is the main
proponent), and
explains why the attempt is unsuccessful.
(This article is based on sections of the chapter 'Art and Time' in my recent book Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux's Theory of Art.)
