His subject was the capacity of art to integrate humanity with the cosmos.
At opposite ends of the twentieth century, they prove a capacity of art, when sufficiently both impassioned and adept, to dramatize worldly injustice with fury and flair.
Without the show being thematic, the four contenders are battling with questions of content, the capacity of art to deal with the world.
What Auden's dictum leaves out is the capacity of art, from Aristophanes's Lysistrata to Swift's Modest Proposal and Picasso's Guernica, to heighten awareness and rearrange consciousness.
"All his life," writes Mr Prochnik, "Zweig had venerated two things: the dream of human unity on earth and the capacity of art to induce a sense of earthly transcendence all woes and petty factionalism sublimated in aesthetic rapture".
The design delves deeply into the meaning of continuity: the regeneration of streets and cities; the persistence and mingling of multiple memories in the changing polyglot metropolis; and the capacity of art to transcend cultural categories even as it helps define them.
Besides the capacity of art to provide alternative visual narratives of a besieged city, art in this context is a tool that participates in construction of the city itself.
In Sartre's What is Literature? this apparent disdain for the materiality of painting seems at odds with another aesthetic principle of the existentialists, namely, the capacity of art to witness the obtrusiveness of the world, and, in exceptional moments of aesthetic communion, its inhuman beauty.
Hedges discounts the capacity of art to exceed the bounds of media spectacle.
He is a firm believer in the potential and capacity of art and pop culture to give way to social justice and the power of a story to change hearts and minds.
