James Stevens Curl, in his work 'Making Dystopia,' analyzes how modernism in architecture represents a deliberate attempt to sever tradition and destroy any notion of beauty, historic continuity, and art, with visible consequences written across the landscape.

Reynolds explicitly taught that to train as an artist, one must study craft in the Netherlands but to achieve greatness one must acquire 'the great style' from Italy, thereby establishing a hierarchy where intellectual/conceptual achievement was valued over technical mastery.

The entire Dada and surrealist movement was characterized by an astonishingly dirty and hypersexualized quality, which formed part of the broader project of tearing down hierarchies of value and inverting established artistic norms.

Frank Gibbard, the fashionable modernist architect hired to redesign Kendall in the 1960s, was responsible for the absurdities of the Wigwam Cathedral in Liverpool, exemplifying how modernist architects systematized the destruction of medieval English towns.

The pre-WWI world in Britain was characterized by a remarkable separation between citizen and state, where gentlemen could go an entire lifetime without significant interaction with state machinery, representing a fundamental shift to the bureaucratic state that emerged post-war.

Kendall's parish church is one of the largest in England, and its scale reveals the historical importance and prosperity of the town before modernization.

Reynolds defined artistic beauty as purely subjective and mental—'an idea which subsists only in the mind,' never beheld by sight nor expressed by hand—thereby philosophically severing art from objective craft and enabling the later claim that any subjective intention constitutes art.