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 noosphere, 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.
THE ARTIST AND HIS ART
21 Inside this fundamental relationship with time, the artist has used his art, his ability to create, for three main purposes; and he has two main tests of success.
22 His simplest purpose is to describe the outer world; his next is to express his feelings about that outer world, and his last is to express his feelings about himself. Whichever of these purposes he has in mind, his test may be that he satisfies himself or it may be that he satisfies and pleases others. It is probable that all three purposes are present, and both tests satisfied, in varying degrees in almost every artefact. The simplest and most unemotional realism, mere description, still involves the selection of the object described; any expression of feeling about the outer world must obviously also be an expression of the artist’s inner world; and there can be few artists so self-sure that the approval of others means nothing to them. For all that, there have been great shifts in emphasis during the last two hundred years.
23 When other means of description were almost nonexistent, art had a great representational and descriptive duty. It made what was absent present; the bison loomed on the cave wall. The, to our eyes, charming stylization of Stone Age art was certainly, to begin with, a result of technical inefficiency, not of lack of desire to paint as realistically as possible. But very early on the cave men must have realized that stylization had a double charm: it not only brought to mind and recorded the past or the absent, but the deviations from strict reality also kept the real past and the real pressure at bay. So the first function of art and stylization was probably magic: to distance reality at the same time as it was invoked.
24 There was also a strong ritual motive in the use of stylization. It was only a short step from drawing animals in charcoal in order to give information to accentuating certain features because such accentuation seemed more likely to guarantee the end desired – killing for food, and so on. Some scientists argue that this ritual- traditional element in art represents a great flaw in its utility, a kind of only partially sloughed skin the poor artist has to drag behind him. They point to all the empirical methods and criteria that science has evolved to rid itself of ritual-traditional elements. But this is akin to the absurd fallacy that one can produce great art by the exercise of pure logic and pure reason. Art springs from humanity as it is, from history, from time, and it is always more complex in statement, if not in method, than science. It is for other human beings; it is consolatory or menacing, but always more or less therapeutic in intention, and its therapy has to apply to a thing far too complex (and indeed ritualistic) for science to control or cure – the human mind.
25 A second great utility of style must have become more or less consciously apparent to the visual artists of primitive man. Style distorts reality. But this distortion is in fact art’s most vital tool, since by its use the artist is enabled to express his own or communal feelings and aspirations. Fifty-breasted fertility goddesses are clearly not failures to portray realistically, but visual translations of feeling. The parallel in language is the development of metaphor and all that goes beyond the strict needs of communication. The parallel in music is the development of all those elements that are not strictly necessary as accompaniment to dancing; all beyond the drum or clapped hands.
26 The first two artistic purposes, representational and outer-feeling, were the main ones until at least the Renaissance; and the third purpose, inner-feeling, has been triumphant only during the last century or so. There are two principal reasons for this. The first is that the development of better means of exact representation than art has made purely descriptive realistic art seem largely mischanneled. The camera, the tape recorder, the
