The aim of this article is to examine the growing predominance of audacity, or that which audaciously seeks to be taken as such, in all the manifestations of the art of our time. To do that, and to be able to agree or disagree with any meaning, it would be best to start by limiting ourselves to a definition which sets certain boundaries for the word audacity, which, by its very nature, defies that kind of qualification. The Petit Larousse can't help us out because it very cautiously defines audacity with such synonyms as boldness and daring, and for boldness and daring gives the definition of audacity, which once again proves that a dictionary is no more than an ingenious collection of tautologies. In order to break that vicious circle I venture to propose, without much rashness on my part, that we understand by audacity that attitude which consists of ignoring what is expected of you and daring to what no one else dares to do.

Modern man in the western world is constantly afraid of wasting time. He therefore measures time, uses it in small quantities, and conducts his activities in such a way as to waste as little as possible; he arranges his appointments with a remarkable degree of precision, his offices are known for their scrupulous punctuality, and the word “urgent” is nowadays used a great deal. Sportsmen are intent on breaking the kilometre record by a few tenths of a second, and the omnipresent instruments for measuring time—watches, clocks, chronometers, also agendas, calendars, etc., reveal the preoccupations of modern man. Civilization today shows itself acutely conscious of the value of time, and regards it as a sign of economic rationality that everyone should attempt to divide his time economically between all the tasks of which his existence is made up. “Time is money,” says the popular proverb, and one meets hundreds of people who express their anxiety “not to waste time” on activities of lesser importance, which “can afford to wait” or do not “deserve to have too much time spent on them.” So that the importance of a matter is measured in practice by the amount of time one is willing to spend on it. Equally, time itself gains in precision and exactness, and we try to fit into an incompressible period of time a mass of activities which would formerly have been spread over a longer period. Our civilization is the civilization of impatience.

The creation of any empire is comprehensible only in terms of the passion that carries it along, exceeds its historical dimension and returns to a cosmic dimension that is common to the whole of time. Great historical phases are only established in and as history by a passion that is the foundation and the cancellation of their historicity. The peoples who were called Barbarians were only called this for the way in which their upheaval of history was felt to be a cosmic and natural happening, beyond history in as much as it did not issue from history and expected nothing from it either. They were “all or nothing” in the pure state; they demonstrated at one and the same time the fact of having nothing to lose and everything to gain; they were the mixture of the origin and the end of the times; they were the irruption of the cosmic as such within the very core of history.

In the character of witchcraft as a universal phenomenon of human beliefs, though also as a manifestation of behaviour and social institutions, there is something indistinguishable that for a long time has interested and intrigued many authors concerned with widely differing spheres (historians, sociologists, anthropologists, writers, poets, etc.). Already in the 16th and 17th centuries the new humanism, begun by the Middle Ages, was accompanied by a renewal of interest in “occult sciences,” “white” or “black,” and the positivism of the last century itself was transformed without eliminating the fascination for witchcraft indicated in the researches on satanism.

Everyone who has anything to do with modern art recognizes the importance of Cubism, an importance that goes beyond the quality of individual pictures and resides in their bearing on the entire tradition of the past. Cubism not only changed the face of art for all the coming generation, it did so with a suddeness unprecedented in the history of artistic innovation. All other movements of so extreme a character had taken at least the lifetimes of two or three artists to accomplish their aims. Cubism became at once the most influential movement on the continent; within a decade it had run its course and made its impact. Nothing in the arts can compare with it. Still, it is not altogether singular.

Temporal recovery and prescience or preknowldge clearly belong to the realm of imagined time, for they brazenly threaten to disobey the unidirectional structure of successive or linear time. It goes without saying that the acts of fantasizing recovery or preknowledge belong to what becomes an expanded sense of nowness. Fantasizing trascends mere temporal imagining, for the processes of recall and expectation are transformed and accelerated into momentary wish fulfillment.

Figuratively speaking, fantasizing and imagining may be thought of as running in opposite directions along the same spatial plane. Apparently restrained by the objective mold of chronological succession, imagining in the form of recall returns the experience to the present while fantasy of recovery “succeeds” in “transporting” us to the “time” of the original experience. Expectation on the other hand, “projects” outward our feelings, hopes, and dreams as bolts of content to fill the emptiness of future while fantasies of preknowledge barely “succeed” in bringing to us, through subjective prematureness, an elaborated interpretation of a now replete future.