EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Why art’s meaning repeats

There is never any new content in art [see definition below].¹ Art’s meaning is true. Truth is constant. Thus, it must always be true. And it must always have been true, at least since the development of mankind. So, if art expresses fundamental truths about the human condition, it has to repeat itself. Truth, another way of saying Wisdom, is ancient. It was ancient knowledge when Socrates and Plato learnt some of what they knew from Egypt. For instance, an ethical code from the Old Kingdom (c.2500 BC) advises students to lead sober lives and gain control over their emotions.² Yet, despite its great age, wisdom must be sought over and over again by each new generation and each new human being. That’s why we need art. It expresses these truths in contemporary metaphors, in the language of the time and culture, so that those with the capacity to understand can at least become aware of the challenge.

The writer Macedonio Fernandez made one of his characters say some words God supposedly heard before Earth’s Big Bang:

“Everything has already been said, everything has been written, everything has been done.”

The man goes on to say:

“Things do not begin, no one would question that. Or at least they do not begin at the moment they’re invented. The world was invented old from the beginning."³

 

1. As ever, my definition of art is "visual poetry" just as true literature is poetic but journalism or history are generally not. Scripture is always poetic. Illustration, the mere copying of the external world, is not art in any medium. Children never make art; part-time amateurs rarely. One of the features of visual art and its equivalents in writing and music is that even though it may seem to describe the external world, its real setting is internal and universal. That has always been the case and always will be. If you doubt it, please read several dozen of the entries on EPPH. You may change your mind.

2. Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, Gifts from the Pharaohs (Paris: Flammarion) 2007, p. 215

3. Fernandez, Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, trans. by Arthur Nestrovski cited by Harold Bloom in Omens of the Millennium (London: Fourth Estate) 1996, p. 230.