Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art

But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow.

Drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies – the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about – is apparently immortal.

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

One thing is sure: the Sagrada Familia is the first Catholic temple whose bacon was ever saved by Shinto tourism. Not even Gaudi, who believed in miracles, could have forseen that.

America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.

It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.