![]() If you are looking for a cause, it might be in the collapse of restrictions such as taste the collapse of propriety the collapse of property. The increased volume of replicas and standardized products could have led to an increasingly restrictive notion of art just as easily. It seems that the very opposite could have happened. H: I’m curious as to what might be causing this. All experience is undergoing what one might call “esthetization.” Everything has come to be intelligible as esthetic experience. Now, I think it is happening: everything has come into the domain of sensibility. So, if such a transformation is under way, it may be, but not because there is any regularity or necessity in the scanning of time. But this sort of dealing in intervals is more anthropological than I would now like to consider. These efforts to establish monothetic regularities of happening were under the influence of “generation theory,” which I still think has a lot in its favor and is a perfectly acceptable way of segmenting history. K: Well, I’ve always thought that that part of The Shape of Time was one of the weakest in the book. As we are now some 60 years past “the modernist transformation,” do you feel that we are entering some new interval in the evolution of art? You also note that an abrupt change in Western art and architecture occurred around 1910. H: In The Shape of Time you note that intervals of 60 years often lapse between certain stages of history. Quotations from The Shape of Time, reprinted by permission of Yale University Press, are inserted within the text. The following interview took place on Jin New Haven, Connecticut. The repeated decay of theories of art into mutually antagonistic positive and negative extensions, into formal and antiformal derivatives, has convincingly demonstrated the impossibility of defining art restrictively, execpt for very short intervals of time. It then becomes an urgent requirement to devise better ways of considering everything man has made.Īlthough offered in response to historical and archeological needs, Kubler’s definition, and its many implications, relate directly to our present circumstances. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art. ![]() Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world. His search for a universal historical grammar, applicable to all societies and all ages, leads him to a boldly expansive definition of art which he states at the opening of the first chapter: Its author, George Kubler, addresses himself with uncommon grace and lucidity to the problems of constructing accurate historical narratives out of the tangled and often incomplete residue of human culture. ![]() It has become a classic of humanist thought. TEN YEARS AGO A slender volume appeared with the striking title, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things.
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