ART WARS:
The Religion of Cubism
In the dome of the Capitol at Washington, DC, a painting depicts The Apotheosis of Washington . Personally, I prefer the following pair of pictures, which might be titled Apotheosis of the Cube.
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A New York Times article says Tony Smith's instructions for fabricating Die were as follows:
"a six-foot cube of quarter-inch hot-rolled steel with diagonal internal bracing."
The transparent cube in the upper picture above shows the internal diagonals. The fact that there are four of these may be used to demonstrate the isomorphism of the group of rotations of the cube with the group of permutations on an arbitrary set of four elements. For deeper results, see Diamond Theory.
For an explanation of why our current president might feel that the cube deserves an apotheosis, see the previous entry, "The Rhetoric of Power."
See, too, Nabokov's Transparent Things :
"Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son."