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

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

Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?

Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

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

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?