particular world

'The Louvre realized a kind of Kantian ideal for art as the object of disinterested contemplation. It had from the start its dissenters, notably the aesthetic and architectural theorist Quatremère de Quincy, who in 1796 led fifty artists in a protest against the removal of Italian masterpieces from their original settings. The battle over the museum as the place where art is stripped from its original context and shown in a new setting has been with us since the first years of the first museum. From the outset, the museum as collected booty had its justifications as well.'

• ... encyclopedic imagination, something that you would ascribe to one of Balzac’s maniacal collectors or one of Maupassant’s fetishists, rather than to...

multiplicative inverse

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Mark Twain

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph." – Mark Twain

“unnoticeable”

'When shapes get this third dimension of depth, they become forms.… When given form, circles become spheres, squares become cubes, triangles become cones or pyramids. Form takes up space in either a real or implied way. In paintings or drawings, for instance, form is implied because it’s an illusion of three dimensions. With sculpture, on the other hand, form is real because it takes up three-dimensional space. Visual artists use light and shadow effects to create the illusion of three-dimensional form.'

‘reading’ the texts at all

'But the argument against humanism seems frequently to depend not only on particular inclinations in the implied definition of terms, but also on a confusion of some of the most important terms. This conservation from which forms, manners, traditions and arts emerge, the ‘humanities’ among them as select educational values, is a natural process (in so far as culture is ‘naturally’ developed) over which we have some discriminating control, and which we can value or devalue at will, choosing to have a care for what comes to us, or deciding (not always unwisely, perhaps) that some things are not worth the cost of keeping. By its nature it is not static.'