Dogs and Demons

The building of monuments is now so important for Japan that it deserves to be studied as an independent sector of the economy. What follows is, I believe, the first step-by-step outline of the business and planning of monuments in either Japanese or English.

Government subsidies underpin it all. With construction so lucrative to bureaucrats and politicians in charge, building mama has overrun every part of Japan. Most of the «pork» goes to the countryside, since the Liberal Democratic Party, heavily dependent on the rural agricultural vote, has governed Japan with only slight interruptions for a half century, and it supports a policy of special rural subsidies, most of which are earmarked for construction. That is why the more remote the countryside, the greater the damage. A tiny mountain village like Iya Valley in Shikoku depends on construction for more than 90 percent of its income; government handouts for building dams, roads, and kominkan (community halls) are its very lifeblood.

In the case of halls and monuments, the Ministry of Home Affairs'Bonds for Overall Servicing of Regional Projects (chisosai bonds) channel much of the subsidies to local entities. Using chisosai bonds, towns can borrow up to 75 percent of the cost of their monuments from the government, which shoulders 30 to 50 percent of the interest. Subsidies also cover 15 percent of «ground preparation,» including landfill and foundation work, which is often the most expensive part of construction.

In addition, Japan has a Monument Law. In the 1980s, Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru began with a onetime grant of ¥100 million to rural areas to use any way they wished. Had the money gone to «dogs» – planting trees, beautifying river-banks – it might have led to real benefits, but it was intended for «demons,» for striking monuments and attention-gathering events that are much more expensive. So with only ¥100 million, small towns could do nothing much. (Perhaps the biggest success story concerned the town of Tsuna, in Hyogo Prefecture, which used its money to buy a sixty-three-kilo gold nugget, and drew more than a million tourists to see it.) Takeshita followed up with a full-fledged law that provides subsidies to «specially targeted projects for building up old hometowns (furusato zukuri)» waiving interest on loans for «ground preparation» and facilitating chisosai bond issues. Even with subsidies, villages like Toyodama can hardly afford the expense of their mosques and museums, but with debt so easy and with bonds matched by government grants, provincial towns have not resisted; during the 1990s, small towns borrowed about a trillion yen for their monuments.

So the money is there (albeit on loan). The next step is to plan what sort of hall your town is to have, and planning a monument isn't easy. The architect YamazakiYasutaka, an expert in civic-hall construction, says, «They are not building these halls in order to vitalize culture. The aim is, through building halls, to vitalize the economy. To put it strongly, in the name of these halls, local governments are simply building whatever they want to build.»

The journalist Nakazaki Takashi illustrates how a hall gets planned. When the village of Nagi in Okayama decided that it needed a monument, its first idea was a museum of calligraphy, but regional authorities pointed out that a monument is not a monument unless a famous architect designs it. So Nagi approached Isozaki Arata, and Isozaki told village officials that if they would allow him a free hand in designing a museum according to his own ideals, he would agree to do it. Flattered by the famous architect's attention and at a loss how to build a monument otherwise, Nagi agreed to Isozaki's terms. What the village got was a modern museum housing only three artworks, two by Isozaki's cronies and one by his wife, with a small token calligraphy gallery tacked on at the back. The three artworks (valued at ¥300 million) were included as part of the construction budget, but Isozaki never told the village the details of the fees the artists received; the total cost came to ¥1.6 billion, about three times the village's annual tax income. Takatori Satoshi, the director of the museum, said, «There was nobody in the village who could talk back. It could be that those who had some idea of what was going on were scared and didn't dare raise their hands.»

The town of Shuto in Yamaguchi Prefecture (population 15,000) set out to build a community meeting place. The town fathers consulted with the construction-department head at the prefectural office, and in a scenario reminiscent of Nagi's, the department head called in his college buddy, the architect Takeyama Sei, who proposed a concert hall. While this was far from the original purpose of a meeting place, and though Shuto villagers had little need for a concert hall, who were they to argue? The Shuto Cultural Hall (Pastora Hall) opened in 1994, a huge concrete block in the middle of rice paddies, with a rooftop performance space large enough to seat 1,500 people.

The next step after «planning» is «design.» Commercial architecture accounts for most of the new buildings in Japan, which is of course true around the world, and in Japan these are designed largely by in-house designers working for giant construction firms and architectural agencies. These buildings share a common grayness, uniformity, and cheap commercialism. As for independent architects, their work generally falls into the two familiar styles: manga (comic-book fantasy) or massive (overwhelming office block).

The leader of the massive camp is Tange Kenzo, whose solid, single-piece constructions aim to impress with weight and majesty. This style dominated in the 1960s, when he designed the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, and at first it featured traditional Japanese forms duplicated in concrete, such as pillar and post, or jutting roof beams. A turning point came in the 1970s, when Isozaki Arata insisted that it didn't matter if a building looked Japanese or Western. Japanese culture, he argued, had no core, so the architect was free to quote wittily from any tradition. This was the beginning of the manga style, with its emphasis on curious shapes and fantastic decorations. Architecture came to be seen as «contemporary art,» as a form of sculpture.

The architects Ito Toyo, Shinohara Kazuo, and others took the next step when they invented the term fuyu-sei, «floating,» to describe a type of building made of punched metal, colored plastic, and glass with a quality of temporariness and impermanence. This self-consciously trashy, cheap, shiny look caught on like wildfire, and it dominates mainstream architecture in Japan today, even inducing a «massive» builder like Hara to add fuyu touches to his New Kyoto Station.

During the high-growth decades of the 1960s and 1970s, two developments influenced architects in Japan. Kathryn Findlay, a British architect working in Tokyo, put it this way, «From the 1970s a number of Japanese architects felt that it was necessary to divorce architecture from society, economies, and city planning, and become a self-referential art.» So in the first development Japanese architects considered that they should not be constrained by the buildings' environment. They felt no need to harmonize their buildings with cities, no requirement to site them vis-à-vis rivers or hills, and no need to take a backward glance at history. In a sense, Isozaki was perhaps right when he declared that Japanese culture had no core.

Of course, when architects sit down in front of their desks and start drawing, who knows what extraordinary visions may flow from their pens? Dreaming up castles in the air is part of what they are supposed to do. But in most modern contexts local history and the natural environment have tempered their dreams. In the 1930s, Le Corbusier drew up a plan for Paris that would have demolished the old urban center and replaced it with wide avenues fronted by rows of tall rectangular office blocks. He called this plan Ville Radieuse, "Radiant City." But Parisians dismissed Radiant City with horror, and today it is considered a byword for the misguided schemes of egotistical architects. The history of modern architecture in America is replete with the corpses of similar bizarre ideas.

A fierce argument rages between architects whose buildings are meant to stand alone as pure art, «object-oriented,» and those whose structures meld into their surroundings «contextually.» Mostly, city planners try to strike a balance between the two points of view.

In Japan, however, there is no «context,» only «objects.» Hasegawa Itsuko, the high priestess of the fuyu movement, has written: «At the opening [of an exhibition] we were shown a video of modern Japan. Scenes overflowing with people, cars, and consumer goods, scenes of chaotic cities and architecture, a confusion of media information, coexistence of traditional ceremonies and people's multi-faceted life of today-after seeing it once even I, who live amongst it, found myself completely exhausted.» The logical direction out of this chaos is escape from the dreary and prosaic Japanese urban landscape. Any touch of variety, even something hideous, is a welcome release. Upon seeing the Hinomaru Driving School, a black building with a huge red globe emerging from it, Shuwa Tei, the president of a Tokyo architectural firm, said, «It's so ugly and unexpected it's endearing.» Hasegawa sums it up: «Architecture that fits in with the city and leads people into various activities-through these alone we will not see liberated space... We must aim at developing a liberated architectural scene worldwide, by conceptualizing architecture between time and space.»

What this jargon means is that it is old-fashioned to design buildings that actually fulfill a useful purpose or improve people's lives, and it is more important to have buildings that are «liberated» from «time and space.» An example of a liberated building would be Saishunkan Seiyaku Women's Dormitory in Kumamoto, designed by Sejima Kazuyo and commissioned by Isozaki Arata for a project known as Artpolis. This building from the early 1990s, intended to house young women employees of a pharmaceutical company, won the Japan Institute of Architecture's Newcomer's Prize. Judges praised it for its elegant modernism, which Sejima achieved by squeezing four women into each room of the living quarters and having a large common space; she based her concept on the Russian Supremacist view of housing. Design an uncomfortable, even miserable, apartment block of the sort you might find in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, and the Japan Institute of Architecture will award you a prize for elegant modernism.

Fuyu, «floating,» could not be a better image for the rootless feeling of modern Japanese architecture. And designs abound for imaginary cities wholly unrelated to the real places where architects live. Recently, Isozaki curated an exhibition called «Mirage City-Another Utopia,» featuring fantastical buildings to be located on the uninhabited island of Haishi, off Hong Kong. As Kathryn Findlay has said, «Mirage City sums up the attitude that architects here have: detachment and distance from the places where they build.»

The second important development affecting architecture in Japan was the increase in money flowing to construction. On the crest of the monumentalist wave, Japanese architects had opportunities to design structures far more bizarre – and more numerous – than they could have imagined several decades earlier. Largesse from the construction industry funds glossy magazines and pamphlets advertising the work of Japanese architects to all the world.

Foreign designers find the wild and wacky fantasies of Japanese architects amusing, even enviable. What fun it must be to throw off the fetters and design as one might for a science-fiction set or a comic book! The international design community lionizes architects like Kurokawa and Isozaki. They have what architects everywhere desire but almost never have the luck to find: lots of money and total freedom.

The structures decorated with sheets or domes of perforated aluminum designed by Hasegawa Itsuko, Queen of Monuments, dot the landscape from the far north to the distant south. Her work, which epitomizes the manga school, also provides an opportunity to deploy the academic doublespeak used to glorify her aesthetic. The architect described her Nagoya World Design Expo Pavilion as follows:

A distant view of this building emulates a misty landscape, with layers of perforated metal panels and see-through screens reflecting the atmospheric colors of the clouds and seas. The garden is reminiscent of the spiky rocks in Guilin, China or a group of chador-covered Muslim women. It is actually a rest area with custom-designed chairs made of perforated plywood and shaded by milky white fabric tents. Imaginary trees made with expanded metal sheets and FRP (Fiber Reinforced Plastic) change their appearance constantly by reflecting sunlight. A deformed geodesic dome «high mountain» is also clad with FRP and perforated metal sheets, and surrounded with a great sense of nature.

Let's think about this. Hasegawa's «great sense of nature» includes a «misty landscape» made of perforated metal sheeting, a «garden» of brightly painted plywood, and «trees» of aluminum and plastic cutouts borne on steel columns. Words cannot do justice to what this structure really looks like: a jumble of functionless, pseudo-tech decoration, with columns sprouting sheets of metal and plastic cut into squares and ovals. This is nature on the Death Star, not on earth. Pure manga.

And why not? What is the Nagoya World Design Expo Pavilion anyway but another monument with no inherent purpose? A clutter of sterile decoration is as good a design as any other, although what this has to do with nature is a mystery. Hasegawa s masterpiece is considered to be the Shonandai Cultural Center, built for the city of Fujisawa. It consists of a hodgepodge of huge spheres, littered with bits and pieces of glass and aluminum, with her trademark metal and plastic trees.

This she calls «architecture as a second nature.» She goes on to say, «We thought that if we architecturally recreated a primal hill (which existed on the site before development) and established vestiges of nature hidden in the urbanity, then we could possibly find a new nature in the man-made environment.» This, she believed, would help us move «from the 20th century history of exploitation to a more soft-edged symbiotic unity.»

Let's return to our study of how to build a monument. Having achieved a «soft-edged symbiotic unity» in the design, the next step is to build, for construction is the whole point. The budgets sometimes make this comically clear: in an extreme case, the city of Ono in Kyushu had to fill its museum with replicas because no money had been set aside to buy art. The contractors, commonly chosen by closed bids, feed a percentage of the profits back to local politicians. Bureaucrats, architects, and laborers on the work crew all benefit.

Trouble arrives later, when the bills come due. Monuments are albatrosses for the cities and towns that commission them. Osaka has lost so much money on its waterfront projects that the prefecture has gone bankrupt and survives financially only by borrowing from the central government. The optimistic prognosis for the new Tokyo Bay projects is that expenditures will break even in 2034! Subsidies may cover construction, but they do not cover the management of monuments, as small towns have learned to their horror.

The operations headache goes back to the fact that most monuments do not satisfy any real need. In the case of Shuto's concert hall, the operating cost in the opening year was ¥30 million. This hall was one of Takeyama's greatest hits, combining architectural interest with high-tech acoustics, but since the village didn't need a concert hall it stands silent most of the year. The town of Chuzu (population 12,000) in Shiga is burdened with a combined cultural hall and health center (Sazanami Hall) dreamed up by the architect Kurokawa Kisho, which cost ¥2.2 billion to build and requires ¥44 million a year to manage. In order to maintain Sazanami Hall, the town had to cut its general expenditures from ¥20 million to ¥13 million-and this was only to cover operations, before it had to begin repaying its share of the construction budget (¥1.6 billion).

Tokyo has added the biggest behemoth to its extensive stable of white elephants. The Tokyo International Forum, beloved of world architectural critics for its curving glass walls following the train tracks near Tokyo Station and for its tall atrium, was completed for ¥165 billion in January 1997. It opened with a high occupancy rate, having rented out its meeting rooms to municipal agencies celebrating its completion. But within a few months occupancy had sunk to below 30 percent, with no hope for a revival in sight. Lovely though the atrium is, there was no need for it in the first place. Although it is labeled an «international forum,» it is neither much of a forum nor international, though its upkeep is world-class: this elephant gobbles fodder to the tune of ¥4.6 billion a year. And the new Yokohama Stadium, constructed at a cost of ¥60 billion, has only one purpose-to host a few competitions in the Soccer World Cup planned for 2002. There is no long-term use in sight, and Yokohama expects maintenance fees to run into hundreds of millions of yen every year.

To make matters worse, all these halls and stadiums face fierce competition from one another. The commuting town of Sakae (population 25,000), an hour outside Tokyo, opened a multipurpose civic center in July 1995, with a hall that seats 1,500 people, welfare facilities, and a «community base» called «Fureai [Get-in-touch] Plaza Sakae.» Unfortunately for Sakae, the neighboring, even smaller towns of Inzai and Shiroi opened similar halls at the same time. Meanwhile, not far away, the cities of Matsudo, Sakura, and Narita all have big halls of their own. Sakae can't compete.

Small towns burdened with heavy operations fees turn again to mother's breast, the Construction Ministry, from which they can suckle more subsidies if they agree to build new monuments. The town of Igata is caught in such a cycle of dependency. Igata agreed to build three nuclear-power generating facilities in its environs in exchange for hefty grants (¥6.2 billion for the third plant alone). But the town used up all the money on multipurpose town halls and other facilities, so it approved expansion of the third plant in exchange for more subsidies. These did not suffice to return the village to financial health, for the cost of maintaining its empty monuments was so high that Igata exhausted the funds by 1995. Igata now has no choice but to accept another power station.

Managing monuments successfully is largely beyond the capacity of the bureaucrats who are in charge of them. In some cases, there is no choice but to give up the original purpose of the hall and recycle it. The town of Nakanita, in Miyagi Prefecture in Kyushu, led the way in the 1980s with its Bach Concert Hall, at the time the most high-tech concert hall in Japan, which today is used for karaoke contests and piano lessons.

The painter Allan West, who lives in Nezu, Bunkyo-ku Ward, in Tokyo, described his experience with a new center that opened in his neighborhood. The organizers intended to have an «international room» for crafts use by locals, so he stopped by to ask what their plans for the room were. They had no idea. He suggested that they install a printmaking press for public use, and gave them a catalog of presses. They weren't interested.

Yet they had taken the trouble to draw up regulations for the international room:

1. The room can be used only by groups of at least ten or eleven people.

2. At least seven of these people must live within a six-block area of Nezu.

3. They must pay ¥3,000 per person, per day.

4. They are not allowed to leave any materials at the hall.

5. A majority of a group's members must be present in order for them to use the room.

Allan then offered to buy and donate equipment for the room, but they turned him down. «It seemed like the building administration wanted to make their lives easier by making the facility impossible to use,» Allan says.

Concerned about the low level of management know-how, the National Land Agency opened a course of study for people in charge of cultural halls in February 1995. According to Kogure Nobuo, the cultural-affairs director of the Local Autonomy Unified Center, participants come for one reason: «Their desperate problem is that they can't make ends meet.»

One thing is clear: an entirely new service industry is in the making. Every year billions of dollars will flow nationwide to support tens of thousands of directors, curators, planners, office workers, and sales and custodial staffs. What is remarkable about this situation is that it runs counter to the official Japanese view that a service economy is not as viable, productive, or profitable as a manufacturing and construction economy. What, then, are we to make of the business of managing monuments, which employs so many people to provide for so little social need, creates no wealth, and relies almost entirely on public handouts for funding?

Grandiose slogans cover up this tawdry reality of Japanese cities and their monuments. Slogans have deep cultural roots – words, in ancient Shinto, are magic – and the ideals stated in words sometimes have a greater psychological truth than material reality. One can see this principle in action daily in the business or political world, where people will typically state the tatemae (official position) rather than the honne (real intent); nor is this seen as duplicitous. The tatemae may not reflect objective truth, but it describes the way things are supposed to be, and that is more important.

Also, in a military culture, slogans are the equivalent of shouts going into battle. Officials preface public activities in Japan with battle cries. In March 1997, the city of Kyoto published the results of its Fifth Kyoto 21 Forum, its title trumpeting, «An Avant-Garde City at the Turning Point of Civilization.» That's the blood-stirring tatemae. The actuality is a blah industrial city that has temples on its outskirts lined with loudspeakers.

Every monument and new city plan has exciting slogans to go along with it. Take Okinawa, one of Japan's poorest regions. We hear that the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications is going to develop an Okinawa Multimedia Zone aimed at creating an «info-communications hub for the entire Asia-Pacific region.» Meanwhile, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry is planning something called Digital Island, and Okinawa officials are proposing the Cosmopolitan City Formation Concept.

Yokohama describes itself as «cultivating its image as a 24-hour international cultural city, a 21st-century information city, and an environmentally friendly, humanistic city rich in water, greenery and historical places.» Alas, Yokohama, where trains and buses shut down after midnight, is not «24-hour»; nor is the city international (its old foreign community has largely disappeared); certainly it is not environmentally friendly or particularly cultural; and it is not especially rich in greenery or historic sites. The port does have a lot of water.

Imaginary towns like «Mirage City – Another Utopia» boast even more glamorous slogans than real cities. Mirage City, Isozaki tells us, is «an experimental model for the conceptualization and realization of a Utopian city for the 21st century – the age of informatics.» It will feature «inter-activity, inter-communality, inter-textuality, inter-subjectivity, and inter-communicativity.» In the slogan lexicon, «twenty-first century,» «communication,» «hub,» «center,» «cultural,» «art,» «environment,» «cosmopolitan,» «international,» joho hasshin (broadcasting of information), fureai (get in touch), «community,» «multipurpose,» «Asia-Pacific,» «intelligent,» and words beginning with inter-, info-, or techno- and ending with -Utopia (or variants: -opia and -pia) or -polis are favorites.

Slogans require a certain amount of care in handling, since their true intent is often far from their surface meaning. Take, for example, the term «symbiotic unity,» kyosei, used by Hasegawa Itsuko to describe her metal-and-plastic trees. Kyosei literally means «living together,» and it is a rallying cry for modern Japanese architecture, made famous by Kurokawa Kisho, who used it to justify proposals like the one for filling in Tokyo Bay by razing a mountain range. Kyosei, in other words, is exactly the opposite of «symbiotic unity with the environment.»

There is a lesson here that has profound implications for the way foreign media report on Japan. It is all too easy to accept the slogans at face value and not question what is really going on. For example, the city of Nagoya made plans to wipe out Fujimae, Japan's most important tidal wetland (after the loss of Isahaya), and use it as a dump site. Faced with local opposition, the Fujimae project is now on hold – although the future of the wetlands is far from secure. Yet Nagoya plans to host Expo 2005 based on the theme «Beyond Development: Rediscovering Nature's Wisdom.» How many foreigners will attend Expo 2005, visit charmingly designed pavilions, listen to pious speeches about Japan's love of nature and about «rediscovering nature's wisdom,» and never guess the devastation Nagoya plans for the wetlands right outside Expo 2005 s gates?

In the case of modern Japanese architecture, foreign critics come as pilgrims to the holy sanctuary, abandoning critical faculties that they use quite sharply at home. Consider the following effusion by Herbert Muschamp, the architectural critic for The New York Times, on the Nagi Museum:

Try to visit the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in the rain, when the drops form rippling circles within the square enclosure of a shallow pool and the steel wires that rise from the pool in gentle loops make it seem as if the drops have bounced off the surface back into the air, freezing into glistening silver arcs. Or go when it's sunny, go when it snows. Just go, or try to imagine yourself there. Though Nagi is barely a dot on the map, the museum is more startlingly original than any built by a major city in recent years.

The reader will recall that the Nagi Museum is the one that cost three times the village's annual budget, with only three artworks housed in three sections (in Muschamp's succinct description, "a cylinder and a crescent, both sheathed with corrugated metal, and a connecting rectangular solid of cast concrete"). Inside the cylinder, the artwork consists of a replica of the sand garden at Ryoanji Temple pasted onto the curving walls. «The museum, completed last year,» Muschamp informs us, «is one element of a municipal program designed to strengthen the town's cultural life, partly in the hope of encouraging young people to remain in the town instead of migrating to the big city.» If Muschamp really believes that three works of esoteric contemporary art housed in a tube, a crescent, and a block would keep young people from leaving this remote village, then he might also believe all the other slogans: that Kyoto is an avant-garde city at the turning point of civilization, that Okinawa is an info-communications hub for the entire Asia-Pacific region, and that the city of Nagoya is moving beyond development to rediscover nature's wisdom.

Observers sometimes find that what is most touching about the Orochi Loop is the naive faith of the people of Yokota in the wonders of «technology,» and it brings a smile to city dwellers' lips when we think of how pleased the villagers have been with the Loop's big red-painted bridge, kept lit all night. But the same is true of the international art experts who write about modern Japanese design. What could be more quaint than architectural critics' unquestioning acceptance of weird monuments because they stand for that wonderful thing, «art»?

A friend of mine, William Gilkey, taught piano at Yenching University in Beijing at the time of the Communist takeover in 1949. He told me that when the propaganda and purges started, the professors and intellectuals were among the first to start mouthing slogans about «liberation of the proletariat» and about «sweeping away dissident elements.» On the other hand, the common people of Beijing had better sense: greengrocers in the market simply ignored the political jargon for as long as they could without being arrested.

Likewise, the majority of the Japanese people aren't taken in by the slogans of monumentalism. They don't travel to visit either the Orochi Loop or the Nagi Museum. As we have seen, domestic travel is dwindling and international tourism is skyrocketing for the Japanese. They are not nearly so gullible as bureaucrats and art critics make them out to be. They know what a real museum is, and they know where to find it. According to gate receipts, the museum most frequently visited by the Japanese is not in Japan; it's the Louvre.

Unaware of the mechanisms of the Construction State that drive Japan to build monuments, and ignorant of the real history behind the founding of the Nagi Museum, Muschamp tells us, «It is peculiar, a century after artists rallied around the cause of art for art's sake, to find oneself in a museum created for art's sake. Strange because for what other sake should art museums exist?» If Muschamp only knew!

«A work of art?» wrote Mark Twain in his celebrated essay about James Fenimore Cooper's Thе Deerslayer.

It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no life-likeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are-oh! indescribable; its love scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

One could say much the same of the Nagi Museum, the Shonandai Cultural Center, the Toyodama Mosque, the New Kyoto Station, and of course the Orochi Loop. They have no order, system, sequence, or result; no reason for being except government subsidies to the construction industry. A highway loop smashing through a valley, a giant corrugated metal tube plopped in the middle of a scenic village, «new nature» in the form of a bulldozed hill lined with aluminum trees. What are these things, really? A sand garden pasted on walls – the humor is pathetic. Aluminum trees touted as «new nature» – the pathos is funny. Across the length and breadth of Japan, an encrustation of unneeded and unused public monuments tricked up as 1960s sci-fi fantasy – the waste of money is indescribable, the slogans are odious, and the academic jargon used to explain and justify it all a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.