A Gustave Courbet Portrait Of A Trout

The Basic Project Of Art Is Always To Make The World Whole And Comprehensible, To Restore It To Us In All Its Glory And Its Occasional Nastiness, Not Through Argument But Through Feeling, And Then To Close The Gap Between You And Everything That Is Not You, And In This Way Pass From Feeling To Meaning. It's Not Something That Committees Can Do. It's Not A Task Achieved By Groups Or By Movements. It's Done By Individuals, Each Person Mediating In Some Way Between A Sense Of History And An Experience Of The World.

In The Somme Valley, The Back Of Language Broke. It Could No Longer Carry Its Former Meanings. World War I Changed The Life Of Words And Images In Art, Radically And Forever. It Brought Our Culture Into The Age Of Mass-produced, Industrialized Death. This, At First, Was Indescribable.

Why Should We Expect Modernist Taste To Be Any Smarter Than Premodernist Or Postmodernist?

Political Stress Is Always Apt To Shrink The Private Arena And Attach It On To The Public

It Was The Basilica Of Gossip, The Vatican Of Inside Dope.