A Gustave Courbet Portrait Of A Trout

On The Whole, Money Does Artists Much More Good Than Harm. The Idea That One Benefits From Cold Water, Crusts And Debt Collectors Is Now Almost Extinct, Like Belief In The Reformatory Power Of Flogging.

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 Keys To Our Century. A Touchstone Of Modernity Itself.

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.

The World's Fair Audience Tended To Think Of The Machine As Unqualifiedly Good, Strong, Stupid And Obedient. They Thought Of It As A Giant Slave, An Untiring Steel Negro, Controlled By Reason In A World Of Infinite Resources.

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 Doggedness Make You Think And Feel; Art That Isn’t Merely Sensational, That Doesn’t Get Its Message Across In Ten Seconds, That Isn’t Falsely Iconic, That Hooks Onto Something Deep-running In Our Natures. In A Word, Art That Is The Very Opposite Of Mass Media.