time - A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. Or, either a point or an interval in this continuum.

Related terms: duration, period, passage, epoch, era, age, season, cycle, instant, episode, incident, tempo, rhythm, beat, posterity, eternal, infinite, interminable, continuous, persistent, permanent, change, mutable, immutable, indestructable, posthumous, and immortal.

Time is an important factor in a number of art forms. It is crucial to literature (narrative, etc.), music, dance and theater of course. In visual art, time is an element in automata, mobiles, and kinetic sculpture; animation is a time-based art, as is cinema, video, and much of new media. An artist can imply the passage of time in a static piece of work by incorporating rhythm or periodicity, and when evoking history or the future (think about memories, metamorphoses, allegories, and palimpsests).

It is artificial to remove time from life, and various cultures have chosen to recognize  annual observances of art-related events. Among these are artists' birthdays, and other specially designated days, weeks, and months of every year. Those on the following chart are officially recognized in the United States of America.

Examples of art concerned with time in various ways:

Paris, France, Watch: Young Louis XIV on Horseback, c. 1650, enamel, gold, diameter 2 5/16 inches (5.8 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. See horology.

Eadweard Muybridge (American, born England, 1830-1904), Animal Locomotion Plate 59: Running Man, c. 1887, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, photographs taken by a series of cameras. Muybridge printed these as sheets of sequenced exposures, although they are displayed here as if projected like a movie — a technological development Muybridge is considered to have pioneered. See Eadweard Muybridge photos reproduced at the "Masters of Photography" site. See movement.

Eadweard Muybridge, Jumping a hurdle; saddle; bay horse Daisy Plate 640 of Animal Locomotion, 1887, collotype, Worcester Art Museum, MA. See animation, cinema, and equine art.

Paul Manship (American, 1886-1966), Time and the Fates Sundial, 1938, bronze, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. See Art Deco.

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976). See mobile.

Joseph Kosuth (American, 1945-), Clock (One and Five), English / Latin version, 1965, clock, photograph and printed texts on paper, unique, 61.0 x 290.2 cm, Tate Gallery, London. See conceptual art and horology.

• "Tempus fugit." (Time flies.)
  
  
• "Time isn't used, it's experienced."
  Hopi proverb.
  
  
• "We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose."
  Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), French poet. My Heart Laid Bare (written c. 1865; published in Intimate Journals, section 111, 1887; translated by Christopher Isherwood in 1930; revised by Don Bachardy 1989).
  
  
• "Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, Time stays, we go."
  Austin Dobson (1840-1921), British author. The Paradox of Time.
  
  
• "The past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are."
  Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), British poet and playwright, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," a long political essay, 1891. See aestheticism and artist.
  
  
• "Nothing causes more melancholy in me than the passing of time. It is in such formal disagreement with my feelings, with my sense of identity, that it is the very source of my poetry."
  Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), French poet and critic. From Lettres à sa marraine; quoted in: Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, chapter 10 (1955).
  
  
• "Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."
  Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. Labyrinths, "A New Refutation of Time" (1964).
  
  
• "Time is the only critic without ambition."
  John Steinbeck (1902-68), U.S. author. Writers at Work, "On Critics" (Fourth Series, edited by George Plimpton, 1977). See art criticism.
  
  
• "We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past."
  Tom Wolfe (1931-), American author, journalist. Ken Kesey's philosophy, as explained in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, chapter 11 (1968).

Timelines:

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art's timeline.
  
  
• The WebMuseum timeline.
  
  
• A timeline of art at the Sanford Corporation's site (— they manufacture various art materials). There are several nice images here and brief articles on a few major artists, media, and styles.
  
  
• Art History Timeline has images and links to numerous civilizations before 1900, including those of ancient Egypt, China, India, Greece, Rome, Japan, Mesoamerica, etc.
  
  
• A time line of graphic design 1959-1999.
  
  
• Classical Myth is a site that has a timeline of Greek history, along with images and texts for each Olympian god.
  
  
• A graphical timeline of the 4.5 billion years of earth's history.

• Look at the map of the United States, and choose the area in which you need the official time. Synchronize your watches!
  
  
• Designing a calendar and need to know the dates of holidays in any of 27 countries? Head over to GoodBusinessDay.com.

Also see art conservation, art restoration, choose, four-dimensional, chronology, heritage, horology, kinesiologist, measure, movement, science and art, space-time, and tradition.

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