The Comfort Factor

“The aesthetic revolutions of the 20th century, in painting, music and literature, reflected the galvanizing cataclysms of the times – the world wars, the Holocaust, the nuclear peril. Now, when the world seems more fragile, dangerously fragmented and morally ambiguous than ever, may not be the time for more form-smashing revolution in the arts. The great artists of our time are like spiders, poised on a web that spans the past as well as the precarious present. They sense vibrations, from now and then, and spin out glittering new strands of connection.”