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

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.

On Platini's presidential watch... he has to balance all the leagues, all the dreams and needs of hundreds of clubs across his continent.

The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.

Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public