Hi James

Thanks for your interesting comment. 

RE: “They emphasize symbolic value, which lasts as long as the symbols answer to human needs”

So, given that this “answering” process could presumably come to an end, art on this view could not last timelessly?  That is, it is not exempt from time?

Thus, the lasting would presumably happen “in spurts”, so to speak – when the symbols and the needs happened to match up?  So Gothic sculpture (to take an example), was ignored for three hundred or so years (from about 1550 on) because, if we follow the logic, its symbols stopped answering to needs? Then, in the late nineteenth century they started to answer again and today they continue to do so (hence our admiration for Gothic art)?

I see one positive and two negatives in this explanation.

The positive is that it matches up with the fact that art does not, as once thought, last timelessly – i.e. it is not exempt from historical changes: it does in fact go through periods in “limbo”.

A major negative is that it doesn’t account for the fact that much of the art we admire today was not “art” originally – so it has changed its nature as well as re-emerging from limbo. So it’s not just that art with a certain “symbolic value” comes and goes; it has also changed from being non-art (religious images etc) to art.

The other negative - or at least, problem - is that one would need to explain the relationship between “symbolic value” and art. And there would no doubt also need to be explanations of why certain symbolic values lose and regain their "answering" capacity at certain times. But all that's no doubt, a longish story... 

DA