The Art of Time and Place

But Lessing’s idea was to attribute the difference between the poetic rendition and the sculptural one to the fact that poetry, the art of time, describes an action, in the course of which one can evoke repugnant events without making them unbearably evident, while sculpture (like painting, the art of space) can only portray an instant, and in fixing it could not show a disgustingly distorted face because the disfiguring violence of physical pain would not be reconcilable with the beauty of the portrayal.

I don’t have anything profound to say about that. It just made me think of poetry and music as the arts of time, and sculpture, painting and photography as the arts of place, which for some reason struck me as a fascinating way to start considering them. Shrug.