Art is relational. It does not exist like a can of soup on a shelf whether or not we devour it. It must be digested to exist. What is a sonnet without its reader or a song unheard? Marred paper. Noise.
Art, then, exists as humans do, in time: before, during, after. Always changing, never the same, it cannot be defined. A nursery rhyme means something in the nursery, something wholly different half a century after. Like love or any emotion, it’s mortal, mutable, impermanent.
This week I finished experiencing the TV series The Crown (60 hours over seven years) and Dickens’ Bleak House (18 hours over three months) and filed my last missive of 2023 (60 or so hours over a year, if you read them all: 600 hours since inception). These are mighty chunks of time, notable allotments of our earthly store. (A school year runs twelve hundred hours or so, including recess and lunch.)
The longer a relation, the more deeply it affects us. Familiarity deepens with time. We grow together, get used to one another, become so much a part of each other we lose a sense of where one begins and the other ends. Who am I without Jane, my kids, grandkids, you? I can’t rightly say – but different surely.
Art relations, like human, can be brief, sweaty, and intense, or long and various: one-night stands or journeys. Length dictates pace. One cannot read a hundred of Shakespeare’s sonnets at a stretch: one’s brain would fry. Neither will a twenty-minute snippet of, say, Parsifal affect you much. Parsifal’s stunning close, if you’re susceptible, depends on the six hours preceding.
No one taught me this in school. We were introduced to artworks as if they were things, not creatures. People ask, “Have you read Bleak House?” My correct answer is “Yes, thrice – and it was a different book each time” – but that’s more than anyone wants to hear.
The conclusion of The Crown moved me surprisingly – not because it’s profound art or because I care particularly about this family, but because we’d spent so much time together. Seven years! Where was I, were we, seven years ago! Before retirement, grandson Dion, Rome! At the commencement – if you can remember so far – of Trump’s emergence! Before God came calling! The same, I must presume – for sanity’s sake – but different, with different concerns, needs, eyes.
As a person’s sensibilities change over time, so do generations’. Most of today’s art will feel old-hat tomorrow, but some, miraculously, will feel fresh, still apt, to the next generation, then the next. What is it about Homer and Shakespeare that snags us and won’t let go? We call such art “timeless,” but that’s wrong. It’s stubbornly timely, here and now.
Art responds to its moment and should be interpreted that way. A response is a critique, more or less explicit. We should ask about a sonnet of Shakespeare, “Why did he write about this topic in this way? How did his concerns mirror or differ from ours?” Only then should we disassemble his construct, like an engine, into its parts.
Why did The Crown capture us? Because it showed a family making its way through our moment and felt true. Seldom did we roll our eyes with disbelief. Was it the whole truth? Of course not – nothing is. Were its hypotheses of what occurred accurate? Who knows. It felt plausible, the way we might have behaved in similar circumstances.
It quivers, too, as the remembrance of a time. Sixty hours before a bright screen, companionably eating our dinner, so much together.