The emotive qualities of light as a prime factor in artistic expression

Abstract

What we do possess to-day as 'art' a faked music, filled with exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocted out of the form-wealth of millenia some new "style'' which is no style at all since everyone does as he pleases. A lying plastic that steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this, the taste of the "man of the world" can be accepted as the expression and sign of the age. Everything else, everything that sticks to old ideals is for provincial consumption. This is the year 1965 - nearly fifty years since Oswald Spengler published "The decline of the West" The paragraph I have quoted by way of justification for this dissertation is in turn a justiification of the fact that Spengler is as valid today as he was in 1918.