Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre

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.

What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre

In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.