ABSTRACT
James Elkins: In The Experience of Landscape, Jay Appleton says “we have little hope of finding anyone in our world of specialists well qualified” in all the fields that touch on landscape. “Perhaps,” he suggests, “we could find a group of experts to prepare a symposium [in italics perhaps because it’s very serious], but this would be predisposed to set out specialist arguments in parallel.”1 What is needed, he says, is synthesis. Now The Art Seminar series is not aimed at synthesis: what I hope for is more like a cross-section, a reasonable sample, of the degree of coherence of talk about landscape.
