ABSTRACT
There is art that reinforces the sense of self, art for informing others’ selves, and the ‘delayed action’ information of self and others that is routed through the culture. Spirituality, art, myths, fantasy and dreams are all ways of holding situations, thinking about them after a fashion, even coming to part-solutions and provisional, working conclusions about things that interest us, and often what they hold for us is as much hope as fear. Gary Shapiro provides an account of the work and thought of this extraordinary time traveller, with the roots of his ideas in the philosophy of Hegel, and Hegel’s identification of the Tower of Babel with the monumental, necessarily public work of art whose purpose is meant to focus a general attention on whatever it is that is vital to the way a community understands itself.
