In the case of Méliès, that vulgar material could be construed as the motion picture machine.
He will suggest that easy access to deregulated sensationalist and vulgar material will degrade the British national culture.
Even the term technocrat is extraordinary: it pretends to divorce economics from politics, when all that happens is that vulgar material interests are disguised under a luxurious tablecloth.
Recognising the charm of the magician's world, the poet Apollinaire wrote: "M Méliès and I are in the same business – we lend enchantment to vulgar material".
This is the theme, though, that comes increasingly to dominate the Glass chronicles: the unsolvable problem of ego and self-consciousness, of how to lead a spiritual life in a vulgar, material society.
Currin, like two of his contemporaries, the exciting figurative painters Elizabeth Peyton and Lisa Yuskavage, dispenses with irony — the nervous signal that, of course, one is smarter than some antique or vulgar material at hand would suggest.
