No Art Goes Unmediated By

For The Machine Meant The Conquest Of Horizontal Space. It Also Meant A Sense Of That Space Which Few People Had Experienced Before – The Succession And Superimposition Of Views, The Unfolding Of Landscape In Flickering Surfaces As One Was Carried Swiftly Past It, And An Exaggerated Feeling Of Relative Motion (the Poplars Nearby Seeming To Move Faster Than The Church Spire Across The Field) Due To Parallax. The View From The Train Was Not The View From The Horse. It Compressed More Motifs Into The Same Time. Conversely, It Left Less Time In Which To Dwell On Any One Thing.

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.

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.

Why Should We Expect Modernist Taste To Be Any Smarter Than Premodernist Or Postmodernist?

An Ideal Museum Show Would Be A Mating Of Brideshead Revisited With House & Garden, Provoking Intense And Pleasurable Nostalgia For A Past That None Of Its Audience Has Had.