Taken from Fragments of the Universe, an article in the review section of today's Guardian:
We can't go around every day acknowledging that space and time are a continuum. We know clock time is a convention but that is no help when you're late for a meeting. In the same way, the insights of cubist painting are useless. It doesn't help to know that the form you call a bottle is really a little universe of hardness, transparency, tubular geometry, containing taste, memory, and all the other things a cubist painter finds in a bottle on a cafe table. Cubism is as spiritual as it is scientific. To live the cubist way would mean to be alive to the texture, weight and fragmentary beauty of the world. It would take for ever to appreciate a bowl of fruit.
