It Was The Basilica Of Gossip, The

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.

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.

A Determined Soul Will Do More With A Rusty Monkey Wrench Than A Loafer Will Accomplish With All The Tools In A Machine Shop.

Essentially, Perspective Is A Form Of Abstraction. It Simplifies The Relationship Between Eye, Brain And Object. It Is An Ideal View, Imagined As Being Seen By A One-eyed, Motionless Person Who Is Clearly Detached From What He Sees. It Makes A God Of The Spectator, Who Becomes The Person On Whom The Whole World Converges, The Unmoved Onlooker.

What Strip Mining Is To Nature The Art Market Has Become To Culture.