John Arnold: belief

Transcript context

…A lot of our Silicon Valley friends — they strongly dislike modernism, and they think it’s a kind of corruption or even perversion. Or it represents decline of the modern or contemporary world. What is it you think they’re missing? I’ve always been drawn to things that are timeless, that were created at a moment in time, and I think that’s what great art is, doing something that’s relevant to the moment. Then there’s only a very limited subset of those things that become timeless, that are still relevant in a different moment, in a different generation or a different century. I think those are the truly great objects. I think there are components of modernism that fit that mold. There are components that you look at, and you’re like, “Eh, that’s dated today” and is no longer appreciated by somebody like me or by many people. What attracted you to buying 17th-century Baroque? Because it seems like an outlier from a lot of the rest of your art collection. Baroque is sometimes seen as the opposite of modernism.…

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