Time & Perspective Quote by Jean Cocteau

Cocteau’s line lands like a thrown champagne glass: elegant, sharp, and meant to shatter the room’s complacency about “taste.” He flips the normal hierarchy. Fashion sells itself as immediate beauty, a kind of visual consensus you can buy into. Art, by contrast, often arrives as a nuisance - awkward, abrasive, even “ugly” - because it refuses the soothing patterns a culture already knows how to applaud.

The intent is partly defensive and partly diagnostic. Cocteau was a modernist who lived through the machinery of trend: Parisian salons, patronage, criticism, spectacle, the early celebrity ecosystem around the Ballets Russes and avant-garde film. He watched how quickly the new becomes a costume. Fashion’s beauty is engineered for the present tense; its success depends on rapid obsolescence. The subtext is economic as much as aesthetic: fashion must die to keep selling.

Art’s “ugliness,” in Cocteau’s formulation, isn’t a flaw - it’s a lag between perception and comprehension. Time supplies the missing apparatus: context, vocabulary, imitation, and the slow schooling of the public eye. What once looked wrong begins to look inevitable. That’s why he says art becomes “more beautiful with time”: not because the object changes, but because we do.

There’s also a sly warning to artists tempted by polish. Make something that pleases instantly and you may have made a period piece. Make something that irritates, and you might have made a future.