The exhibition disrupts this preoccupation by situating the art works unevenly among each other, with one installation flowing directly into another.
The urgency of this preoccupation by Modernism may be one reason that so many of its adherents fell prey to the temptations of extreme certainties like Fascism (Pound, Wyndham Lewis) or Communism Picasso, Dos Passoss).
Scriptwriter Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for his biopic of Harvey Milk, tries to humanise Hoover's unquenchable professional preoccupation by summoning up his reputed double life as a closet case and cross-dresser; the gaudy after-death rumour that was so joyously taken up by the liberal Left, for whom Hoover was such a bête noire.
"Is America wallowing in its own obsessions or are our preoccupations shared by the world?
Abstract Expressionism, movies, McCarthyism, Marlon Brando, existentialism, "On the Road": preoccupations shared by many culturally inquiring Americans, queer and not.
One of Hatto's preoccupations, shared by Barry, was the tyranny of the classical-music critical establishment: "I have always played what I thought was right (for me?) and have taken some censure in my life for so doing.
The readers were transfixed not by the latest political scandal or account of parking violations (a Cairene preoccupation), but by a straight-talking tale of sex, lies and Islamism in the 'Mother of the World' - al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building.
Such preoccupations were prompted by Wednesday's chamber concert, held at LSO St Luke's and conducted by Adams.
Now even the contemplation of such habitats has been eclipsed by preoccupations with endangerment and conservation.
From there, the scene-to-scene action alternates with the twentieth- (or twenty-first) century present, propelled by preoccupations with the nature of scientific rationality, sex (very little, however, about love), and whether the human species has a clue about much of anything.
