Transcending Time, Anyone?:

Open Letter to Artists

This piece of history is enough to push your bottom lip forward.

In 1514, when Persia was under siege from the Turks, the Shah Ishmael secreted away his favorite painter before going into battle. It was a fact of 16th century life that painters were ranked as spoils of war and prized above palaces. Even the popes of Rome vied with Europe's monarchs for artists' services. They knew that if their deeds didn't rate fame after death, the art they commissioned would.

Making my point is the ongoing renown of the 16th century pope Julius della Rovere. Despite his many praiseworthy efforts, including his zeal to eradicate corruption from the church, his claim to fame these five centuries later is that he hired Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling painting

Alas, that was then and this is now. In the face of war today, when planes can be used as missiles to bring down superstructures, and nuclear bombs can raze cities, art is not a priority. Sometimes, after the dead are counted and damages are assessed we turn our attention to treasures lost. In the aftermath of the WTC bombing in 2001, we learned that several Rodins, held in Cantor Fitzgerald's bond brokerage offices in the North Tower, were lost. And after invading Iraq, we saw that the country's National Museum in Baghdad was stripped of cultural artifacts dating back to the beginning of civilization.

So maybe we should ask the unasked question: What art should be protected if we're attacked again? And maybe ahead of the "what" is the "why," as in "why bother?"

H.G Wells seemed to provide the "why" answer in his novel, "The Time Machine," in which a man time-travels nearly a million years into the future and finds life on earth a carefree place of vegetarians. People are so blissful that they've lost their impetus to work, to create, to think. The arts – architecture, painting, books, all unattended – have gone to ruin. An underground population of meat-eaters runs the planet and keeps the population happy until they get hungry.

People are the protein supply in Wells' story – a logical end to what humans would have become: mounds of flesh, of protoplasm without a written word, landmark building or painting to redeem us, to bequeath to those who come after. Wells had his time-traveler return briefly to his own era to pick up three books to bring back to the future. The titles he left to us.

Do you see where I'm going here? What three artworks would you take to a lost future-world that has no past, no history and no interests? In short, what are your picks for forever art? The question has gone pleading ever since our Civil War. That's when President Lincoln proclaimed the Lieber Code, which held that artwork, along with libraries, should have protective status. And in 1907, The Hague asked member nations to avoid shelling structures dedicated to art, as well as history, science and religion. Then, after WWII, The Hague went farther with the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property In the Event of Armed Conflict, which held that cultural property could not be taken from occupied land.

Choices need to be made. We can't protect everything. But it's tricky. For art to transcend time, say, a million years, it can't have cultural reference. It needs to speak without antecedents, without the need for a libretto, so to say.

Are any of you transcending time lately? It's worth pondering, don't you think?

Photo credits: Wikipedia

— by Joan Altabe  |  May 17, 2007  |  Print Version - PDF

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