Looking back on it all now, I realize that the very act of writing books on cultural themes has been a learning process for me.
Writing is a way of testing values, principles and beliefs.
During the process, my own consciousness gets rearranged. My sense of art was radically changed, for instance, by writing The Re-enchantment of Art, an undertaking that led me to question the very roots of modern aesthetic structure. I thought I knew what I believed. Growing up in post-war New York City during the salad days of modernism, I belonged to a community of believers whose religion was art. At eighteen, I was a devotee of John Cage concerts and the Living Theater.