THE exquisite work on many of these unimaginably old pieces
gives the lie to the spurious notion that modern art is the
pinnacle towards which all artists who came before have strived
Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON *
* * * There is nothing new under the sun, or at least as far as
human inventiveness went, there wasn’t for a very long time.
According to the British Museum’s Ice Age Art, we made do with
much the same sort of stone axe for about a million years, then
it all changed. There is a flint blade here that is a perfectly
symmetrical leaf shape, 30cm long, but just 6mm thick. It was
made with exquisite care and extraordinary skill. It is a thing
of beauty and may have been made to be just that, for it is not
functional and may have been deliberately buried. Perhaps it was
an offering to some long forgotten deity. Found in France, in
this context this object is relatively modern, dating from
between 22,000 and 17,000 years ago. It was 40,000 years ago,
20,000 years earlier,