At this writing (2021), the entire history of powered flight, from the Wright brothers to the Rosetta spacecraft landing on a comet, is still encompassed by a single lifetime. There is just one person left whose time on Earth embraces it all. Orville Wright’s famous first flight at Kitty Hawk…

In many ways, the fine arts behave over time very much like technologies. They have cultural content that we don’t usually associate with a CPU microchip or a CNC robotic factory machine but they use highly specialized tools and practices to achieve complex goals and as with other technologies, humans…

The Irish painter Francis Bacon once complained that “Everybody likes Vermeer, except me. He doesn’t mean anything. He has no significance.” Bacon is obviously being combative, but artists and critics do that — it’s a thing — and he’s not wrong that Vermeer was unknown until centuries too late to…