On the paucity of artistic milestones

Technological milestones dominate the timeline of human evolution and history, coupled to transformations in scientific understanding during the last 400 years. These discoveries and innovations diffuse globally without regard for their origins, influencing and disrupting cultures to the benefit of all or only the wealthiest. Science and technology shape the human condition insofar as they frame quotidian life. Technological progress sets limits to our food, water and energy security, and it increasingly strains the operational boundaries of Earth’s systems. Only art, however, can expose the vast panorama of all human experience that grows from roots in Mother Nature.

Whereas a scientist may draw our attention to causal explanations, or commonalities that extend beyond our observations1, it takes an artist to find amongst life’s everyday realities a universal and subjective truth, answerable neither to personal values nor to general theories2. Therein lies a resolution to the question of how such divine and necessary art can merit so many fewer entries than science and technology in a timeline of the human condition.

Causal realities abound, with diversely telling effects as experience teaches us even in carefree childhood; truths, on the other hand, defy counting, except by monotheistic religions which recognise just one, and the soulless who see none. We may seek, perceive and even worship the truth; we cannot be its keepers, evaluators or vanquishers. Truth has no purpose and still gives meaning to our lives. The artistic spirit that animates a truth belongs to the cultures that appreciate it, and on a milestone in consciousness of our place in the cosmos.

• For example: Ibn al-Haytham’s 1021 camera obscura proved the independence of light from vision; Galileo’s 1610 observations of the moons of Jupiter falsified church doctrine of Earth as the only centre of motion in the Universe.
• For example: Sappho’s c. 600 BCE poem Seizure embeds us in a visceral experience of forbidden love; Michelangelo’s 1499 sculpture Pietà reveals a mother’s sorrow beyond tears; Beethoven’s 1826 String Quartet No. 14 communicates all the moods of his rich inner life.

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition