Derek Allan

This paper was delivered as the keynote address at a conference at the University of London on 19/6/2026. It examines a key aspect of André Malraux’s theory of art – his argument that art endures not through a power of timelessness, as Western culture has believed since the Renaissance, but through its power of metamorphosis. “Metamorphosis,” Malraux writes “is the very life of the work of art in time, one of its specific characteristics”. The paper also contrasts Malraux's thinking with the position of traditional aesthetics (such as analytic aesthetics) which has effectively ignored this issue.

It has long been recognised that great art, whether visual art, literature or music, has a special capacity to “live on” – to endure – long after the moment of its creation. Thus, our world of art today includes, for example, ancient Mesopotamian sculpture, Shakespeare’s plays, and the music of medieval times. How does this capacity to endure operate? Or to ask that question another way: what does “endure” mean in the case of art? The Renaissance concluded that art endures because it is timeless – impervious to change, “eternal”, “immortal” – and this solution, which was ratified without question by Enlightenment philosophers of art such as Hume and Kant, still lingers on in some quarters today. But developments since the nineteenth century have gravely weakened the credibility of the proposition that art is immortal, and the idea is now effectively dead. This leaves us with a major dilemma: if art is not impervious to change, how exactly does it endure? If the time-honoured solution of immortality is no longer viable, what alternative explanation can we find to replace it? This paper explains why immortality is dead, describes our contemporary dilemma, and briefly canvasses a possible solution.

Donald Preziosi, an influential modern voice in art history, argues that his discipline has proved ‘particularly effective in naturalizing and validating the very idea of art as a “universal” human phenomenon’. If this claim is true, it would mean, in my view, that art history has done a serious disservice to our modern understanding of art. For as the French art theorist, André Malraux, points out, the idea of art is definitely not a universal human phenomenon, there being ample evidence that the vast majority of cultures throughout history, have not regarded their painting, sculpture, poetry, and music as ‘art’. Today, of course, we willingly regard many works from non-European and early cultures as art and welcome them into art museums, but this is a recent development, barely more than a century old. This paper examines certain major issues arising from this situation, including: when and why the idea of art arose; the radical change in the word’s meaning that occurred after Manet; how this change led to the inclusion of many non-European and ancient works in our modern world of art; and the inadequate responses to these developments by modern philosophers of art and art historians.

This short paper is an English version of a contribution I will make to a colloquy in 1926 in Paris entitled "Les Voyages d'art d'André Malraux." The paper compares Malraux's thinking with what, for convenience, I call “traditional aesthetics,” by which I mean certain key ideas that have characterised aesthetics since its inception in the eighteenth century - ideas advanced by figures such as Kant, David Hume, and other Enlightenment thinkers still prominent today in the current version of traditional aesthetics often called “analytic aesthetics”. The paper argues that, due to its eighteenth-century assumptions, traditional aesthetics is, not surprisingly, obsolete and unlike Malraux's thinking, no longer capable of explaining the unprecedented universal world of art we know today.