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On the Timelessness of Art

David Macarthur

Art critics and philosophers have long spoken of the test of time in connection with art. In this talk I want to meditate on this theme in order to articulate a demanding conception of art, one according to which art aspires, perhaps sometimes achieves, a condition of timelessness at least in our experience of it since, apart from a certain way of looking at it, art is just bits of nature like everything else. I shall argue that the demanding conception makes more sense of central aspects of the way in which we pre-theoretically think about art than the relativist (or undemanding) conception of art that is, undeservedly, widely popular today. You might also say that what I aim to do is to once again attempt to scale the Everest of aesthetics, the perennial question What is art?. I hope you will forgive me if I say this will not be a fullscale assault. Id be happy to simply set up a base-camp to aid future attempts on the summit. One thing I will not be attempting is to provide an answer that helps one tell what is art from what is not, something that has increasingly become a matter of anxiety now that there are so few, if any, settled conventions of art-making or artreception. The task of discerning what is art is properly a job for art

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criticism, which cannot do better than to proceed on a case by case basis. What I do hope to do today is to cast some light on a postRomantic conception of fine art that we have inherited by reflecting on the so-called test of time. The notion of the fine arts was borne in the 18th century, and paradigmatically includes painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry. It is familiar that this is a conception of art as autonomous, wholly distinct from any public function or purpose; what Kant thought of as a matter of meaningful objects of disinterested contemplation. Fine art, so understood, must be distinguished from an older ancient Greek conception of art, which is indistinguishable from craft, according to which art is crucially thought of in terms of its various social, political and religious roles. I shall leave this craft-based conception of art aside for present purposes though, in fact, we live (somehow) with both. At the outset I should say that I shall not be taking a metaphysical or essentialist approach to the question What is art?. The essentialist supposes that every work of art shares a common nature or essence and it is only in virtue of this common nature or essence that something earns the title of being a work of art. Much of the history of the philosophy of art has been concerned with different accounts of this supposed essence including: the Platonic notion of representing reality, the Romantic idea of expressing emotion and the

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modernist idea of having a certain symbolic form. But it seems to me unwise to begin by assuming that there is a fixed constitutive core that is common to all the categories of art and to the wide variety of successes and failures across various dimensions of evaluation within these categories. Instead I want to meditate upon what art critics and philosophers of art have long called the test of time to help illuminate what I shall call a demanding conception of art. I think the importance of this conception has not been properly appreciated because of a widely popular extreme relativism about art. It is the default position today if my undergraduate students are anything to go by. Since this sort of relativism stands in the way of my account let me briefly turn to it now. For a statement of the dominant anything-goes relativism we cannot do better than to quote the former Oxford Literature Professor John Carey who in a recent book titled What Good Are The Arts? writes,

Anything can be a work of art. What makes it a work of art is that someone thinks of it as a work of art though it may be a work of art only for that one person. (2005, 29)

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We dont think anything can be a cat, or a square, or the US President just by thinking that it is. We dont even say something is coloured red just because someone thinks that it is. The case of colour is worth considering further since we only know what being red is in terms of some subjective state, namely, knowing what it is for things to look red. Yet, despite the subjectivity of colour ascriptions we dont relativize judgments of colour to individual perceivers. We allow that any given perceiver may be mistaken about the colours of things because they are colour blind or making colour judgments in abnormal lighting conditions and so on. This is important since it shows that we can admit that a concept, in this case the concept of being coloured, is subjective, without thereby being forced to concede that judgments involving the concept are speaker-relative. To say, as Cary the relativist does, that something is a work of art for a subject simply because that subject thinks that it is, is to give up on any possibility of ignorance or error in matters of whether something is a work of art or not and also, presumably, in matters of artistic value and comparative worth. The example of colour suggests that perhaps the relativist is simply a misguided subjectivist, one who fails to see there is a difference between admitting the subjectivity of a concept (say, art) and being a relativist about judgments involving it.

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In a famous article On the Standard of Taste published in 1757 David Hume, perhaps the greatest English-speaking philosopher, noted that many people have an unthinking tendency to accept the Latin proverb De gustibus non est disputandum which translates as There is no disputing matters of taste. This seems to sum up the popular position today too. Relativists cannot dispute matters of taste since no-ones judgment is, on this view, better or worse than anyone elses. Interestingly, Hume also noted that most people tended to contradict themselves since the very same people who are relativists about aesthetic taste also very often hold that some novels or poems or symphonies or paintings are better than others; and not just in the sense of being better only for them, but better period. Almost everyone acknowledges, implicitly or explicitly, that there are correct judgments of better and worse with respect to the arts. And, in any case, our critical engagement with works of art people do in fact argue about matters of taste. Indeed critics and reviewers for magazines and newspapers get paid to do just this. Here is a list of what I take to be fairly uncontroversial cases of better and worse:

Cormac McCarthy vs Stephen King Bob Dylan vs Billy Joel Henri Matisse vs Ken Done

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Emil Gilels vs Liberace Led Zeppelin vs Stryper

Of course, if you disagree with any or all of these then replace them with your own examples. The important point is that our discussions and arguments about art and aesthetics allow for at least the possibility of both correct and incorrect judgments about works of art. It is certainly the case that we can make sense of the possibility of artistic error, contrary to what the relativist supposes. Consider these fanciful examples due to Arthur Danto:

1. Dynamite struck by lightning in a marble quarry: producing by chance a natural object indistinguishable from Michelangelos David.

2. An earthquake, a blank canvas, and paint in a centrifuge: producing by accident a natural object indistinguishable from a painting of Gerhard Richter.

3. Monkeys typing for play on a type-writer: producing random type marks on paper that just happen to be indistinguishable from the works of Shakespeare.

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These are of course, statistically wildly unlikely events, but they could happen in principle at least. Thought experiments such as this are employed by philosophers to explore conceptual relationships. Danto employed these cases to show that art cannot be reduced to its aesthetic properties since art and its non-art natural counterparts share all the same aesthetic properties. In the present context I am employing these examples differently to show that we should admit that even if these objects seem for all the world to be works of art they cannot be so. A necessary condition for being a work of art is to be a human artefact produced or employed for a certain meaningful purpose. Since these objects are produced by non-human or natural or random processes without the requisite purpose they cannot be works of art even if we couldnt blame someone, unaware of their origins, for thinking that they were. The lesson is this: thinking that something is art does not, just as such, make it art. Relativism is a mistake, Cary notwithstanding. It is also worth noting that the value we place in artworks as reflected in our institutions for storing, displaying and criticizing art (art galleries, museums, universities, libraries etc.) and the money we spend acquiring, storing and preserving works of art is predicated on there being a reasonable basis for determining whether something is a work of art of a certain quality. This is not to deny that ones

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subjective experience of art inevitably enters into ones judgments about what one counts as art and what one values in art. It goes to show that objective and subjective are not diametrically opposed as commonly supposed. At least one notion of objectivity can be built out of subjective materials, namely, inter-subjective agreement. Furthermore, the life we actually lead with art would make little or no sense if this status was person-variable in the way that tasting good is. For the relativist there is also the arrogant assumption that everyone no matter what their age, experience, or learning just as such knows what they are talking about. On this view, there is no such thing as finding a work impenetrable and then only slowly, with some difficulty, coming to appreciate its depths, nor is there any possibility of improving ones taste in, say, poetry or music or painting. The relativist position not only fails in these respects but, moreover, cannot do justice to our critical practice of judging artworks according to the test of time, which is an objective measure of the greatness of art distinct from mere individual preference. Id like to now turn to consider this test and its significance for our conception of art. Hume explains the test of time by remarking,

The same HOMER, who pleased at ATHENS and ROME two thousand years ago, is still admired at PARIS and at LONDON. All

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the changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory a real genius, the longer his works endure, and the more wide they are spread, the more sincere is the admiration which he meets with.

And in another passage he adds,

One accustomed to see, and examine, and weigh the several performances, admired in different ages and nations, can alone rate the merits of a work exhibited to his view, and assign its proper rank among the productions of genius.

Here Hume explains that in order to rank works of art in terms of their aesthetic worth we must apply the test of time: the longer a work of art endures in our appreciation and admiration, especially where the endurance in question involves changes of language, politics, and religious belief, then the greater is the value of the work. It is important to see that Hume is not talking about mere physical endurance since it is perfectly possible for inferior artworks to survive the ravages of time as in the case of, say, inferior examples of architecture or stone statuary.

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Tolstoy suggests that a work can only pass the test of time if it universally pleases all peoples across the ages:

To say that a work of art is good but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying that some kind of food is very good but most people cant eat it.

But this is such an extremely demanding interpretation of the test of time that few, if any, works could ever satisfy it a conclusion Tolstoy curiously accepted. And it fails to do justice to our sense that people are, notoriously, variably receptive to art: some people do not care for it at all, many care for some artforms and not others, and there are those who are, relatively speaking, good or bad or middling judges of artistic merit. I suggest, then, that what matters with regard to the test of time is the enduring interest and high estimate of those who have proven themselves to have good judgment in such matters, those we regard as having good taste: in Humes terms these are the true judges or critics who have delicacy and fineness of taste, adequate prior experience of the relevant art form, the capacity to compare and evaluate works within the relevant category and a just and reasonable understanding.

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To pass the test of time what counts is achieving an enduring universal, or near universal, consensus of those deemed to be of good taste in the relevant category of art. Hume is representative of the tradition in thinking that the point of the test is to discover, or settle disputes about, comparative judgments of artistic worth. And since passing the test of time is a matter of degree the result of applying the test will presumably be an ordering of works of each particular art along a scale of relative greatness. I want to take the logic of this test a step further, however. The ideal limit of this test is a timeless masterpiece, a work that we never tire of, but which will continually reward the attention it seems to demand. My claim is that an important conception of art treats all art (or all art worthy of the name) as aspiring to satisfy this ideal of timelessness even if any given work of art is only ever relatively timeless in the sense of actually surviving the test of time for a certain period. I shall call this a demanding conception of art. According to the demanding conception the test of time does not just reveal a way to adjudicate the relative worth of artworks across time, it also reveals an important respect in which art seeks to transcend one of the fundamental conditions of human existence, time. Seeing something as a work of art is attempting to see it from a Gods eye point of view, a perspective which treats it as something timeless. The

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limit notion of the test of time is a work that satisfies our aesthetic sensibility and understanding for an eternity, without any limitation in time. We might go even further and say that the artwork aspires to be viewed as if outside time, atemporally. In support of this view, consider how we regard acclaimed masterpieces. According to what I have said so far one might suppose that the greatest masterpieces, such as the paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo or the symphonies of Beethoven or the plays of Shakespeare, are those works that have passed the test to the highest possible extent. But we do not in fact treat such works as on a common scale with, and comparable to, more ordinary works. We treat masterpieces as having already achieved the status of timelessness. We do not test them; on the contrary, they test us. To fail to respond to them in the appropriate manner is not to show that they are lacking; rather, it reveals a deficit in our capacity to appreciate their undeniable greatness. The enigmatic 20th century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, remarked that The works of great masters are suns which rise and set around us CV 15. A masterpiece is as fixed and stable a part of our world as the sun; and like the sun it is in virtue of it, and the other masterpieces, that we can navigate our way around in the world of art at all.

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Wittgenstein perfectly expresses the demanding view of art that I have been articulating: The work of art, he writes, is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis or, in other words, under the aspect of eternity. He goes on to connect this perspective with seeing art as a limited whole, a world unto itself, disjoint from nature and its causal comings and goings. The idea of the worlds independence from us is an idea that haunts contemporary philosophy as evidenced by its obsession to articulate various forms of realism such as moral realism, scientific realism and common sense realism etc. What art provides, however, is the contrary idea of an independence from the world, which we might read as a way of imagining or fantasying our own independence from the world. Supposing that art is an analogy of the self then in this instance the self is pictured as self-sufficient, carrying its meaning in itself, quite unaffected by the slings and sorrows of outrageous fortune. Isnt this part of the symbolic point of the special spaces known as art museums where art is cordoned off to be gazed at but not touched, set behind ropes and glass? The demanding conception of art can also help to explain a certain ridiculousness or embarrassment that is not uncommonly felt in the presence of art. I take this experience to be an intimation of arts pretention to an almost-impossible timelessness. It seems all too easy

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to wonder how anyone can hope to live up to this ideal. Samuel Beckett expresses this concern beautifully, writing,

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good house-keeping, living. (Disjecta, 1983, 145)

According to Beckett art aspires to the sort of timelessness that characterizes the greatest masterpieces. And if we ask what it is to achieve this timelessness it is obvious that the artwork must be eternally interesting, ceaselessly meriting our attention, and offering us collectively over time an inexhaustible sensual contentfulness. It is worth reflecting further on this last point. Masterpieces, no matter how many times they have been interpreted in the past and no matter how many different interpretations have resulted from this interpretative activity nonetheless continually invite new interpretations that go beyond any previously arrived at. Roland Barthes took this to show that interpretations are more or less free-wheeling creations of the reader or audience for art. I take it otherwise: to show that the greatest art resists our capacity for theorizing about it. Art invites and sustains our critical attention over and over again but it is a mark of its greatness

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that it never seems to be fully captured or exhausted by all the theories we appeal to in order to contain it. Just think, for example, about your nearest university library and the section devoted to Shakespeare criticism which grows feet longer with every passing year. No wonder Beckett thinks that artists and art are haunted by a sense of failure. How on earth can anyone or anything live up to this ideal of something akin to eternal love?