Day 0022

I went back to the Met to soak up some Greek and Roman sculpture and pottery. I drew a sketch of a 2,400 year-old Greek lion. I had the room to myself for most of the time.

For me, most of the magic of these sculptures come from their immense age. They are solid, tangible manifestations of the same artistic impulse we have today, unchanged over millennia.

And so the art collapses the gap between the past and the present for me. Look at how modern this 6,000 year old marble figurine is. It could be something from the Picasso sculpture exhibition I saw at the MoMa the other week.

I get a depressing feeling about the legibility of art across the ages. Are we doomed to repeat ourselves, with nothing but small variations here and there? Is there progress, can there be? There certainly seem to be unconscious and conscious repetitions across cultures and across times, both in terms of the content and the styles. It feels oppressive to think that art has all been done before; is there anything new to say or represent? I'm not convinced. And here I am making endless copies of the masters...

A wider question is, can new thoughts be thought at all? Is everything I have thought or felt merely an iteration of what someone else somewhere has already experienced? Everything is more or less a variant on a theme. Being around the stuff from the Greeks makes me think that back then you could genuinely push an intellectual or experiential boundary, whereas now -- billions of people's lives and thoughts and experiences later -- I'm not sure how much is left for us.