
Progress-Discontinuous
RECENTLY I CAME ACROSS A statement that Leo Steinberg made in the late ’60s. In effect it’s a thought that comments on its own time: “The legitimacy of retrojecting from our immediate experience to remote fields of study touches on the issue of relevance. No one imagines that relevance attaches to particular subject matter. Making things relevant is a mode of seeing.”2 Very simply, for Steinberg, nothing is naturally relevant. We make something to be so; it is a way of seeing, pointing to, underlining, calling attention to. We find issues from the past and what might be considered recondite and