Does art have an endgame?

My aunt-in-law Catherine emailed me last week and I haven't had a chance to answer her directly yet. I thought her question was sufficiently interesting that I want to open it up to my readers, in the hope of spurring a nice long comments thread:

"As Matt's grandma Elizabeth (the devoted scientist--Heather, I wish you had known her) used to say, art never becomes obsolete. We are still looking at Greek statues, performing Greek plays etc, and these works speak to us much as they spoke to people at the time the works were new. In contrast, there's nothing left of Greek science; no one takes ancient scientific ideas seriously.

So does that mean that science is progressive and art never gets anywhere? Science builds on itself but art is just the same thing over and over?

If that's true, it may be so because art deals with the individual human (we learn more about ourselves through art), and human beings are pretty much the same now as we were during classical Greek times. In contrast, science deals with the material world, and we can always learn more about that by increasing the spatial and temporal scales of our observations into areas where materials behave differently (microscopic, astronomical, geologic, nanosecond scales, etc.).What do you think ? Can art get anywhere?"

The beginnings of my own response to this:
1) I think that the arts also build on the traditions of the past, and that lessons are learned from generation to generation of artists that transform the production of art and influence its content. The only off-hand example I can think of is the gradual development of the ability to paint/draw in three-dimensional perspective.

2) Most such developments I can imagine are skills and materials-based: We make longer-lasting paintbrushes, transmit playscripts in print and online, file music on our MP3 players, and so forth. But the plays, the music, the artworks, don't universally "progress" toward something "better." I would hazard a guess that more truly awful art is being produced now than in all of previous human history simply because the world's population is larger than ever before.

3) I have a rather arbitrary response to science as progressive. While I certainly buy that the scientific approach has revealed and will continue to reveal more about the universe, the human body, the composition of an atom, and everything in between, the questions science can be used to answer are not always the questions humanity needs answers to. We have often looked to the arts for those answers, and will continue to do so.

4) On the flip side I think that historical events add layers of meaning to artworks over the centuries, and so rather than "art being the same thing over and over" art undergoes a process of ongoing evaluation. The way we read ancient art today is not the same as the way people then interpreted it. We cannot predict what future generations will preserve of today's art, nor how they will work to interpret it. Artworks that physically stand the test of time continue to evolve in meaning. Just as I believe there is no theatre without an audience, I believe there is no art without a viewer/ listener/ receptor to interpret the art.