assert ((force>justice)&(energy>loyalty))&(glory(trifle))

“The Renaissance was an age of paradox. The heir of the Middle Ages, in spirit it was their antithesis; the spiritual child of Rome, it rejected the Roman ideas of corporation and spirit and empire, and made the perfection of the individual the aim of human effort. The age which set force and energy over justice and loyalty, it was the time when weightless trifles were first glorified for the modern world; the age which rediscovered and worshipped Plato, it was the time when Idea, no longer supported by Religion, ceded her throne to Fact. An age which lives for posterity in its visible works of art, it identified literature with life, and could say with Petrarch, ‘scribendi enim mihi vivendique unus finis erat.’”

Evans, Joan. Pattern: A Study of Ornament in Western Europe from 1180 to 1900. Vol. 2., p. 1. Oxford University Press 1931.

“The age which set force and energy over justice and loyalty, it was the time when weightless trifles were first glorified for the modern world …”—this is a paradox? (Maybe for someone in 1931.)

I'd think the glorification of trifles would follow naturally from valuing force and energy over justice and loyalty. Thinking of this while thinking of #chan, Joan Collins, Frederic Jameson, etc. (if I say Nasty Nets will I get reflamed?). Interesting to compare the baubles of an earlier time to today's, or the time that witnessed the rise of the masquerade ball to the time that witnessed the rise of MySpace.

(To qualify the foregoing, I'm not trying to intersubstantiate European Renaissance art with Net Art, just collocating, and admittedly cheaply at that. The irrelevance of so much of the above quote to today's art and world is I think obvious.)