Art, Metaphor and Epiphany

Parthenon Marbles. Credit: Marcio Cabral de Moura, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Originally published by UK Column

The experience of great art is similar to the experience of a great scientific discovery. There is a common sentiment of “epiphany.” It is the strangely familiar feeling of remembering something for the first time, or having our attention fall on something that had been there all along.

In both the case of art and science, we have the common experience of being made aware of something previously unconscious or “out of mind”—as if discovering the ancient relics of some lost civilization or of our own deeper self.

With the advent of twentieth-century ideas on aesthetics, this unique experience was often narrowed to a question of novelty. Thus, one of the fathers of Modernism, Ezra Pound, famously declared: “Make it new!” However, while twentieth-century avant-garde artists strove to make things “new” and to cause their readers to “feel intensely”, Western classical artistic traditions were …