The Cure for "Ozymandias Melancholia": MoMa's Art and Inquiry MOOC

In my most recent dabbling in the world of MOOCs, Art and Inquiry: Museum Strategies for Your Classroom, a five week Coursera MOOC taught by MoMA, we are being asked to think about why we should engage in inquiry around art. While pondering this important question, I’ve also been thinking about permanence, and remembered one of my favorite Woody Allen quotes.

Woody Allen came up with a condition he calls "Ozymandias Melancholia." He defines the phenomenon as, "that sad and depressed feeling you get when you realize that no matter how great and majestic and important something is at the time, in time it's going to pass. Just like the poem - eventually, time kills everything. It's just that rotting statue of Ozymandias, a once-great statue, and now a broken-down piece of marble in the desert. So you get a depressed feeling because it gives you a sense of the futility of life, that all that you're working for, and all the things that seem so meaningful, are nothing."   

Saul Steinberg, The Spiral 1964

We know Woody Allen is a self-proclaimed whiner, a statue will decay if left in the desert, and art in all its forms is fragile. Whether on a prehistoric cave, or preserved in a museum, art can live for centuries to be discovered, admired and studied for generations, but inevitably art dies. Although we are aware of this, and our own mortality, this does not stop us from creating art because through art, we seek to understand what it means to be human. We create and preserve art for the purpose of inquiry, to express human thought and emotion, our frailties and strength. When we look at and talk about art, we teach and learn about our past, and discover how art, whether modern or ancient, reveals so many parallels to our present day existence. Through art, the artist speaks to many generations, transcending time, engaging the beholder to question, debate, even recontextualize the art to bridge the work’s past purpose to fit a modern day function. Art lives on throughout the ages with the sole purpose of helping us recognize our common humanity, not the futility of life. We engage in inquiry around art to bear witness and marvel at what the artist, the human being, is capable of expressing and achieving.

We never stop creating art even though we recognize time kills everything. If ever we are affected by "Ozymandias Melancholia" and think of the futility of life, art exists to remind us of the power of our desire to express ourselves and to leave an indelible mark. The artist forges ahead to make art in a meaningless world because the artist, and we, as the beholder, know art has meaning and purpose, and defies time. Perhaps it's our quest to defy time why we never abandon creating and looking at art.