The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.
What we have as artists is the immortalization opportunity that others don't have, because our work is lasting; it's there forever to view.
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless.
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
What is extraordinary about contemporary art is the energy - it has our energy. New energy. Pieces hundreds of years old are beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but without our modern energy.
Some people care about their work lasting forever - I have little interest in it.
A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations, which are, in fact, resurrections: without them, there would be no work.
Our works decay and disappear but God gentlest works stay looking down on the ruins we toil to rear.
History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
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