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Instead, art and culture have been safely neutralized as interchangeable commercial objects just like everything else.

At its best, cultural criticism is love and art that exists to give love to other expressions of art. It’s beautiful in its indulgence. A positive feedback loop that gives everybody exactly what they desire. Gods, scribes, muses, an audience, a culmination. This is what we want out of art. Something that feels grand, meaningful, connected to the ages. That doesn’t happen on its own. It needs context, dedicated space, deeper knowledge, appreciation.

One of the things I’ve discovered with buildings, particularly your so-called “high-road buildings” is they can become more amazing as time goes on. As that process proceeds, they are buildings that come to be loved. And once they’re loved, they’re safe, by and large. So the quality of mastery can be in the quality of the materials and crafting of a thing that invites that kind of caring, that will keep the thing going.