The mammoth banks of flowers left at the gates of Kensington and Buckingham palaces after Diana died may have given this practice an international boost. Modern middle-class society is too detached from the physical facts of death. Traditional Italian culture, with its open coffins, corpse-kissing and cemetery visits, is far more realistic. For all of recorded history, flowers have expressed the fragility and evanescence of youth and beauty, the mortality that is man's fate. When the tomb of King Tutankhamen was opened in 1922, the garland that had been placed around the pharaoh's neck by his wife still smelled fresh for a brief moment before the petals shriveled.
Floral tributes are poetic and symbolic, a confession of human subordination to cosmic law.
I'm wondering if you could elaborate on what factors have led to the moribund condition of contemporary high art, and whether there is any reason for believing that the new millennium will usher in another Renaissance in the arts. Even Hughes, who is by no means a biting critic of the contemporary art scene, suggests that teaching trends in art schools have had negative effects. Mich. Dear Mr. Herpel, Thank you for your very impressive and challenging letter. Thanks to advances in technology, pop became a universal language, as catholic in its reach as the medieval church. Once pop art embraced commercial iconography, the avant-garde was dead.