No other word so characterizes the confusion of our age as progress. Progress is made by the hour—new technologies, terminology, shibboleths, identities are born. Those developing and coining and cultivating the new see themselves as making advancements, as irrefutably improving on things. The advent of the new that is necessarily better by virtue of its novelty: This is progress.
Art lovers know best the fundamental apartness of newness and improvement. They know “the obvious fact,” as did T. S. Eliot, “that art never improves.” Eliot was struck by the fact, as Hugh Kenner tells it, while standing in a cave in southern France, looking upon drawn black lines of magnesium oxide that form the shapes of roaming bison. What has been drawn since then, in any medium upon any surface, with more exquisite sensitivity? The artist had stood in the poet’s place some thirteen thousand years earlier.
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