It’s About Time!

In order to participate seriously in society, art must be politically relevant. For that to work, it must resist the indifference to the world that many people ascribe to art; this is crucial, so that viewers can become moving and moved witnesses, or even more: participants, instead of passive contemplators. Only then, in that dialogic attitude wherein art speaks to them but they speak, respond to art, will they reflect more deeply. Then, they can, wherever possible, change their convictions. This is urgent, given the fast pace in which natural and human-made disasters are happening in the present time, killing thousands of people, in addition to the mass-murdering that is currently a way of ruling a country. Urgency is an important factor of time: act now, quickly! Studying how art can convey this message without turning into propaganda which would, according to Adorno, destroy its artistic quality, is the difficult but crucial mission of the Humanities today. This is why I devote this study to the issue of time, as a “traveling concept” that appears in many shapes with different meanings.