Should Art Be Time Capsules?

Many years ago, I was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when my date asked me what I thought the purpose of art was. I think I was looking at a bunch of Pissarros—the ones looking down on the Parisian boulevards—when I thought about her question. I replied with something about how art was supposed to capture what its creators saw, thought, and felt at the time they created their works, both on a personal and societal level. That way, future generations would get a chance to know what it was like to be X at the time of Y.