Should Art Be Timeless or Should It Speak to Something More Current?
Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Adam Kirsch and James Parker discuss whether art should aspire to timelessness. By Adam Kirsch If you Google “Homer” and “bees,” you get images of Homer Simpson, not quotations from the “Iliad.” Photo Adam Kirsch Credit Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson Continue reading the main story In the early Renaissance, a writer who longed for immortality knew that his best bet was to write in Latin. After all, the humanist intellectuals of that era were obsessed with the Latin style of writers like Cicero and Virgil, who had lived a millennium and a half before; why wouldn’t the readers of the year 3000 still be reading and writing the same classical language? Latin was timeless, in a way that vernacular tongues like Italian and French couldn’t hope to be. Following this logic, Poliziano composed his “Manto” in Latin, and Petrarch did the same with his epic “Africa.” Today, of course...