Nearly anywhere else, this remark would seem like a harmless expression of artistic self-assertion.
Some people suggest that the fight has more to do with real estate prices than artistic control, an assertion that Ms. Dauer-Cardasis dismisses as "nonsense".
His essay appeared on the heels of his latest book, "Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories" (Naxos), which repeats its most provocative assertions, blending the artistic, historical and personal.
It is an assertion of social and artistic responsibility to insist that forms have meanings.
But those lightning-bolt absolutes were in fact the assertion of their own artistic energies and the vaulting poetic ambitions that they were priming themselves to realize.
It is often seen as rebellion against the white-box market system, yet it seems equally credible when interpreted as a different kind of assault: the assertion of an implicitly male artistic will over a passive, implicitly female receptacle.
Ms. Cole has drawn some criticism in artistic and political circles here for her assertion that she took over the lead in the movie only at the last minute, when the Taliban cut the feet off her pick for that role, whom she named as Zarifa Jahon.
And Vaughan Williams' own ideas of Englishness weren't orthodox: The Essay (Radio 3, Monday) was an archive recording of him talking about Bach, a lovely tirade against confused notions of "authenticity" in musical performance, in which he casually reversed received wisdom with the assertion, "We English are not literary or artistic, but we are musical".
On closer examination, his belief in the Bacon theory is an assertion of the value of theatrical collaboration, against the tyranny of a single artistic source.
Chateaubriand's theology was weak and his apologetics illogical, but his assertion of Christianity's moral superiority on the basis of its poetic and artistic appeal proved an inexhaustible sourcebook for Romantic writers.
The artistic contrast is, of course, also a social contrast, and Ruskin goes rapidly beyond this to a symbolic assertion of the "iron" values involved in his definition of the just society.
