What Is a Temporal Art?

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online

Musical Concerns: Essays in Philosophy of Music

Jerrold Levinson

Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780199669660
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669660.001.0001

What Is a Temporal Art?

Jerrold Levinson
Philip Alperson

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669660.003.0013

This chapter attempts to identify the main aesthetically

significant senses in which one might say of an art that it is a
“temporal art.” or alternatively a “time art.” First, it proposes
a set of specific criteria to which such an attribution might
appeal. Second, it reviews these specific criteria and gathers
them up into three groups, yielding those which refer
primarily to temporal characteristics of art objects; those
which bear upon the temporality of the experience of art
objects; and those which involve to reference to temporality by
works of art. In so doing, it presents a reasonably complete
taxonomy of such ascriptions. Many of the criteria are
illustrated with reference to three of the most important
temporal art forms, namely music, literature, and film. Third
and finally, it considers some further questions about the
adequacy and interest of the distinctions that have been
outlined.

Keywords: temporal art, time art, art objects, art forms, music, film, literature

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All
Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a
monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 25 February
2017