Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.

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.

Art grows out of modes of perception that make you feel and think...that hooks on to something deep-running in our natures.

Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.

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

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.