Please, if I may ask for just a moment of your patience, I just might be able to organize a few more thoughts.
I’d say I’m close to 95% agreement with your beautifully clarifying post above, so I don’t think my thoughts below qualify as a significant disagreement with them. In fact, some of it echoes what you say, even while stating differences, concerning mainly temporal organization of art, cognition, psychology.
I’ll start with a simple claim: If viewers need a period of time to perceive art, then it is impossible for any viewer to experience an art that exists, as you say, only in a static moment (such as architecture, sculpture, painting, LF prints). I’m sure you noticed your ideas slightly straining, eloquently, and with a nice summersault thrown in, to have it both ways. For example, “a painting, sculpture, structure or photograph exists in its entirety at a given instant,” and then later, “We need time to take them in and recognize [rhythm].” In a phrase, I think if a work can exist “entirely” in a given instant (and maybe it can), then the work, as such, is beyond our comprehension. We won’t perceive it because, I agree with you, we need time. The time necessary, for example, for our eyes simply to take it in. You say columns when looking at the Parthenon and dune ripples when looking at a print “really don't come one-after-the-other in time,” but I hope you might consider that they really do come one-after-the-other (yes, literally) as our scanning eyes take advantage of the requirements of time – looking left to right, up and down, sideways, jumping from point A to point B – whether we’re attending a show of LF prints, visiting Athens, or standing on Maui watching real waves. To be sure, even a work associated with perfect physical stillness, let’s say Rodin’s “The Thinker,” will offer-up rhythm, movement, and other elements of time as we stand before it and admire its contemplative tranquility. Our mind can do no other. I will quickly add that I know this isn’t an iron-clad argument. For example, I’m aware that I’ve left out any mention of Plato’s cave and the eternal, timeless forms just outside the entrance which is at my back.
And I didn’t even get to music and the irrational. Euripides, Dionysus, and Oliver Sacks will all have to wait. BTW, do you remember that old thread about how the eye works? Maybe it's one of the links above by Bernice. Also reminds me of Paulr. This is beginning to remind me of those fun times.
Bookmarks