TIME AND ART
3 Art best conquers time, and therefore the nemo. It constitutes that timeless world of the full intellect (Teilhard du Chardin’s noösphere) where each artefact is contemporary, and as nearly immortal as an object in a cosmos without immortality can be.*
4 We enter the noösphere by creating, whereby we constitute it, or by experiencing, whereby we exist in it. Both functions are in communion; ‘actors’ and ‘audience’, ‘celebrants’ and ‘congregation’. For experiencing art is experiencing, among other things, that others have existed as we exist, and still exist in this creation of their existing.
5 The noösphere is equally created, of course, by great achievements in science. But the important distinction between the artefact and what we may call the scientifact is that the former, unlike the latter, can never be proved wrong. An artefact, however poor artistically, is an object in a context where proof and disproof do not exist. This is why the artefact is so much more resistant to time; the cosmogonies of ancient Mesopotamia make very little impression and have very little interest for us. They are disproved scientifacts. On the other hand the artefacts of ancient Mesopotamia retain both interest and immediacy. The great test of a scientifact is its utility now; of course utility-now is of vital importance to us and explains the priority we accord science in our world now. But disproved scientifacts – those that no longer have this utility – become mere items of interest in the history of science and the development of the human mind, items that we tend to judge by increasingly aesthetic standards; for their neatness of exposition, style, form and so forth. They become, in fact, disguised artefacts, though far less free of time and therefore less immediate and important to us than true artefacts.
6 This timelessness of the artefact has a quantitative aspect; it is of course illogical and ungrammatical to speak of one object as being more timeless than another. But our eagerness to conquer time – or to see time conquered – does lead us into this illogic. We have to be very ruthless, suppress all our intuitive feeling, to find worthless ugliness in an artefact of over a few hundred years’ age. It is true that the passage of time often constitutes a kind of selection committee; objects of beauty stand a better chance of being preserved than ugly ones. But in many cases – such as archaeological finds – we know that there was no selection committee. Ugly objects in their own age survive side by side with beautiful ones; and yet we find beauty in them all.
7 Time, the length of survival of an artefact, becomes a factor in its beauty. The aesthetic value of the object becomes confused with its value as witness, or carrier of information from far places. Its beauty merges into its usefulness as a piece of human communication; and this will plainly vary according to our need of (previous lack of) communication from the particular source.
8 The older an artefact the nearer it is to the timeless; the newer the artefact the further away. Because it is new, yearless, it has none of the beauty or utility of having survived in time; but it may have the beauty or utility of being likely to survive time. Some artefacts are likely to survive because the future can use them as evidence against the age that produced them; and others as evidence for. Onicial art requires only the second kind. Monuments, not testaments.
9 Though this prejudice in favour of what is old or likely to become old affects our judgement of artefacts, and even our attitude to such things as fossils, it does not normally affect our judgement of other objects. In the stone, the mere enduringness of matter; in the artefact, the enduringness of man; of a name or of a nameless human existence; the thumb-mark below the handle of this Minoan pot.
10 An aged artefact is both what could not be created today and what still exists today; we admire in it the number of nows survived. It is doubly present; both survivant and now. This explains the long vogue of the antique. As organisms aware that we shall die, we are in one way nearer the oldest artefact than the newest natural object.
11 Since the normal standard by which we judge artefacts is their worthiness to survive, it is only to be expected that a contrary kind of artefact should on occasion appeal to us: that is, the ephemeral artefact.
12 A whole host of minor arts are, in themselves and by their natures, banned from the noosphere: for example, the arts of gardening, coiffure, haute cuisine, pyrotechnics. If they get into the noösphere, it is by chance, by happening to be made items in some greater art. It is true that the camera and the cinecamera, the tape recorder and the tin can, counter the intrinsic ephemerality of these sub-arts; and it is sometimes possible to reconstitute them by recipe. But it is precisely a part of our pleasure that the direct experience of these arts is essentially ephemeral and not shared by others.
13 The parallel with man: we also pass like fireworks, like flowers, like fine food and fine wine. We feel a kinship with these ephemeral arts, these manifestations of human skill that are born after and die before us; that may be come and gone in a few seconds.
Unrecorded performances in music, on the stage and on the sports field fall into the same category.
14 So there are two kinds of artefact: those we admire, and perhaps envy, because they survive us and those we like, and perhaps pity, because they do not. Both kinds are aspects of feeling about time.
15 All art both generalizes and particularizes; that is, tries to flower in all time, but is rooted in one time. An archaic statue, an abstract painting, a twelve-tone sequence may mainly generalize (all time); a Holbein portrait, a haiku, a flamenco song may mainly particularize (one time). But in the portrait of Ann Cresacre by Holbein I see one sixteenth-century woman and yet all young women of a certain kind; in this austere and totally unrooted concatenation of notes by Webern I hear nonetheless the expression of one particular early twentieth-century mind.
16 This balance between particularization and generalization that the artist struggles to achieve, nature achieves without struggle. This butterfly is unique and universal; it is both itself and exactly like any other butterfly of its species. This nightingale sings to me as it sang to my grandfather, and his grandfather; and to Homer’s grandfather; it is the same nightingale and not the same nightingale. It is now and it is ever. Through the voice I hear – and Keats heard – this passing night I enter reality two ways; and at the centre meet my richer self.
17 How we see a natural object depends on us – whether we see it vertically, in this one moment, now, or horizontally, in all its past; or both together; and so in art we try to say both in the one statement. Always these complex factors of time are inherent in the seeing and the saying.
18 How I see this artefact may depend on how the artist wants me to see it, vertically-now or horizontally-ever; but even with artefacts I can choose. I can see Caravaggio’s St Jerome vertically-now, in itself, or horizontally-ever, inserted in the history of painting. I can see it as a portrait of one old man, or as a study of the hermit; as a quasi-academic study in chiaroscuro problems; as a document with information about Caravaggio himself, about his age; and so on.
19 We also experience artefacts in ‘intended’ and ‘fortuitous’ ways (see group 5, note 49) and in ‘objective’ and ‘actual’ ones (6.23). These too are aspects of time.
20 Both in the creator and the spectator, art is the attempt to transcend time. Whatever else it may be and intend, an artefact is always a nexus of human feelings about time; and it is no coincidence that our current preoccupation with art comes at the same time as our new realization of the shortness of our duration in infinity.