I'm working on a rather unwieldy posting with lots of photos which I don't want to rush, so it's fobbing off time.

So, about the previous post, the one where I disagree with Dennis Dutton, and by way of elaboration: what I think happened was not that twentieth century classical composers, and artists in general, just stopped believing in transcendental values, exactly. Nor was it a case of positively wanting something different, and nastier, as I think I implied in the previous post, in fact as I think I said. That wasn't it. What happened (I now think on further reflection) was that the traditional tonal language of music became tainted in their ears, and representational art became tainted in their eyes, by what it started to be used, in the twentieth century, to celebrate. To be blunt about it, artists felt that traditional art got stolen by hideous politicians.

Take Mondrian. I'm no Modern Art expert, as regulars here well know. I'm an innocent when I go to art galleries, which has its uses and generates its own insights. But I do recall reading something somewhere, in some Art Book, about why Mondrian turned his back on representational art. It was the politicians. It was that vile God, the one who was on "our side", everywhere, right in the thick of all the fighting. I refuse to tell stories with my pictures, he said, because the stories now told by representational art are all monstrous. My paintings are not of anything. They are themselves. They have no meaning, other than what they simply are.

It was as if the artists went on strike. The world wants us to tell lies about God, and about Workers, and about Aryans. Well we won't. And if that means we tell the world a great Nothing, then so be it.

We refuse to sing in tune. Tunes are tunes of spurious glory. Tunes marched the West into the slaughter of the trenches, and tunes wave a blood-sodden red flag or a swastika. Screw tunes.

That, I think, is how Transcendental Values factored in to twentieth century art. It's not that the artists abandoned them, more that they recoiled in horror at the way that monsters hijacked the traditional means of expressing Transcendental Values.

But Dutton's notion that the problem was merely technical, if that's what he truly said (and I realise that I am often wrong about these things), remains, I humbly submit, quite wrong.