What do we see when we look at a painting? Is it the eye of the artist, his or her milieu, or the process that we follow like Ariadne’s thread to some promised destination? Or is it, perhaps, some fragment of affection that its creator felt for the object of making?

Today is not a time for monuments; it is a time for ruins. What front page of a newspaper is not splashed with images of social collapse, disaster, and grief that transfix us with their mournful beauty and fill us with lurid fascination?