I got less lazy

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I'm being lazy. Our sophisticated contemporary intellectual left, and our unsophisticated contemporary intellectual left. Both suck.

it's funny how these feel so much more warm and human than his paintings of people

[Jäger replies] Exactly!

It's the same melancholy, the same sense of isolation. The smokestacks are figures in a landscape. 

There's nothing sublime about Hopper. Effusive aestheticizing says more about the viewer than the work. If you want to find the sublime in the heat and the soot, and the lack—of something, including the limitations of the artist himself—it's up to you. A historian would follow the line from Hopper, to Tooker, to Johns.

Another reminder that for all Jäger's defenses of community and sociability, his true preferences are those of an alienated intellectual, an elitist isolato.

Intellectual history is history for philosophers, but in the end, subtext > text.

I remember getting into an argument with Richard Serra over Robert Smithson, the picturesque and the sublime. Serra took his friend at his word.