If one buys a half-pound of bacon in a supermarket, one gets an ounce and a half of cardboard and plastic wrapping with it. If one stocks up on toilet items in a drugstore, razor, blades, shaving soap, lip-salve, they leave a pyramid of packaging behind. If an electric iron goes on the fritz, who takes it to the repairman? It is easier to get a new

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

The void of the past cannot contain the gigantic constructions and movement of our life.

so that the art experience is replaced by the excitement of peering at inaccessible capital.

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, Goya had written below his etching of a dreaming man slumped at a desk: when reason dreams, monsters are born.

Glass must be a rich field for interpretation, because nothing on its surface is accidental (apart from the accepted accidents, like the dust that Duchamp allowed to accumulate there and then preserved with fixative, or the network of cracks that appeared in the twin panes after a trucking accident). Everything is there because Duchamp wanted, or

One of the great themes of nineteenth-century Romantic painting was the interplay between the world and the spirit: the search for images of those states of mind, embodied in nature, that exist beyond or below our conscious control.

Impressionism found its subjects in pleasures which nearly everyone above the poverty-line could have; and it extracted the images of pleasure directly from the lives of the painters themselves, and of their friends. Renoir and Monet, Sisley and Caillebotte, Degas and Pissarro were very different artists and they saw the world in altogether

to run on shrapnel – is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene.… We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals.…