Greed produced Modernist aRT (with a small a). With the event of the invention of the locomotive and the steamship, began the venturing of provincials from Russia, Poland, the United States, towards Culture which had always been the exclusive possession of a few other nations. Backwoods man began to rise off his four feet and attempt to walk on his hind legs whereby, thought he, he might acquire culture, something he intrinsically did not possess.
So, onto France, whose Revolution had made a tremendous splash of which the delayed echoes, between the pages of recently printed books, were released upon the stagnant provincial eddies whose primitivism was just dying out. In the beginning, only the wealthy could send their sons to Paris, so that out of pigs' ears purses could be wriggled. And even though they may have returned merely more arrogant, they at least learned to speak French which produced the desired differentness, while they remained głombs among other głombs (Polish for a cabbage head stripped of its leaves).

Though France benefitted financially from the mass migration of arty foreigners, it has been severely undermined by these hicks. They, being merely of the quantitative type, were able to mass-deprave Art by weight-imposing their anti-creative trends. Thus, these tricksters obliterated the native French artists who might have been, had they been free of this foreign pestilence, the sterile Locust, that describes itself as Modernist, while depraving the host nation with subversive Cosmopolitanism (pronounce: anti-Patriotism).
One cannot choose to make Art universally cherished, since it is not any particular type of Art that becomes such, but it's expressive quality. Therefore, it is not Cosmopolitanism that makes Art universally appealing, but its greatness, humanity-serving persuasiveness, hence, spiritual Nobility. In fact, from what I have observed, it is the opposite of cosmopolitan spiritlessness, the intrinsic National Character, that makes Art universal. The talentless hordes of the democratized failures, liberated by Public Education, not capable of producing original works of inspiration, are forced to experiment, in the dismal hope that accidentally some of them may discover a trick that would make their nondescript work different from the worthless avalanche of modernist doodlings.

When I was in my late teens, I made this drawing with a diagonally sliced piece off the rough edge of a board. It produced an interesting trick that would make me a different artist among the Parisian multitudes of foreign failures. But any differentness can instantly be copied. A real, creative artist disdains such cheap tricks as unworthy appetizers. Spreading honey on sawdust bread cannot make it more palatable. If anything, it is eloquence that the artist should seek, not odd spellings of words. I made only four or five drawings with a piece of wood, then dismissed the new trick as unworthy of me.