I would like to initiate discussion on this issue. Frankly, I will be surprised if anyone joins in because my experience is that philosophers of art have ignored it for so long that today very few even know what it is about!

The issue is simply this: how do we explain the capacity of certain works of art to ‘live on’ (to use the colloquial phrase) centuries or millennia after their creation while large numbers fall into oblivion?

The question is not about this or that work. It’s about a general capacity of (great) art – a capacity to transcend time – to remain vital and alive despite the passage of long periods of time. And it is also about the way works endure – but that’s a question for later on.

This is a vitally important issue for the philosophy of art (aesthetics). Why? Put simply: everything else in human life – from fads, to social customs, to religious beliefs etc – falls prey to the passing of time and ends up in what Malraux aptly calls “the charnel house of dead values”. Only art transcends time and lives again. How do we explain this? And what might it tell us about the unique significance of art?

Modern aesthetics thinks of art exclusively in terms of its characteristics as an object (e.g. whether it involves beauty, is a matter of “taste”, is a form of representation, etc, etc). The temporal nature of art - its capacity to transcend time - is ignored. I find this an amazing oversight (though one that can, I think, be readily enough explained…)

Having been neglected for so long, the issue I’m raising is often misconstrued. Recently, I’ve added a little page to my website called What the Question of Art and Time is NOT About which is designed to help in this respect. A talk I gave at the University of Ghent last year is also relevant: Time: The Forgotten Dimension of Art. 

I welcome all views...