One thing is sure: the Sagrada Familia is the first Catholic temple whose bacon was ever saved by Shinto tourism. Not even Gaudi, who believed in mir….

If you like your soccer cerebral, and the triumph ultimately to be wrung out of staying power, Milan was the place to be. If you love the uncertainty….

America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory..

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

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public.

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre.

Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the key….

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

Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?.

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….

It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not..

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world..

Drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies – the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid r….

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between..

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

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 ar….

Why wait for a call when you have a command?.

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

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….

The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, i….

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and dog….