A Gustave Courbet Portrait Of A Trout

It Was The Basilica Of Gossip, The Vatican Of Inside Dope.

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.

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.

It Was A Secular Cathedral, Dedicated To The Rites Of Travel.

There Is Virtue In Virtuosity, Especially Today, When It Protects Us From The Tedious Spectacle Of Ineptitude.