Came across this article in the New Yorker about the study and meaning of cave paintings. This quote in particular caught my eye:
”It is Aurignacian, and its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.”
In our time it is customary to identify innovation as the hallmark of a healthy artistic culture. What would it mean for our music, paintings, films and novels to remain static for tens of thousands of years? Are we to conclude from the relatively infitesimal shelf life of our art that it is, comparitively, unsatisfying?
Tags: ancient art, Archaeology
