“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity. I want to restore the terms art and culture to their general nineteenth-century sense. But I also want to apply “art” to everything artificial or fabricated, including engineering projects like roads and bridges. Art for me means all works of imagination, from poetry to television commercials to pornography, with questions of quality still operative. I see the Western past as a story, episodic and cumulative.”