Art in Time is a book that resists the idea of it ever becoming a “timeless work of art.” For poet,
translator, and academic Cole Swensen, the very notion of a “timeless work of art” not only implies a
refusal to engage with the present moment, but also exposes a fundamental problem in our viewership:
our tendency of looking at rather than from within. In this collection of lyric essays, Swensen studies
the work of twenty artists, all of whom have “found ways through landscape to become an active
element in the view and its viewing.”

The book itself remains neatly tied to its own present moment.