I’ve been thinking a lot about architecture and tradition lately, and so this quote caught my eye when I was reading Peter Campbell’s LRB review of the John Martin exhibition currently at the Tate Britain.
The public, which can no longer look for common standards of taste, high craft and skill, is left interpreting a very mixed set of signals; that any bedrock exists at all is without doubt an illusion – new schools and styles build on the rubble of old ones.
I’m not entirely sure I agree that there’s no bedrock at all. I do, however, acknowledge that my discomfort with the lack of “common standards of taste” makes me dangerously close to being a grumpy old man. Win.
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