Great wars bring change. World wars change the world.
Were our politicians changed after 1945, were they different - or were they former politicians?
Did they know that the world would change - had to change?
Did they anticipate the improved assembly line, the resulting unemployment, the small carpenter in the large joinery, the missing shoemaker, tailor, saddler, turner, bookbinder and all other craftsmen?

Could they have foreseen that the gardeners, the grocers, the family doctors would disappear?
That the children of farmers would leave their farms? That our inns would lose their character due to Resopal piggeries and composite windows, that their guest gardens would be demolished into parking lots, that architects could unlearn their former craft, but that their unrestricted right to tear down, their baseness would be rewarded and preserved?
It is said that craftsmanship has a golden soil.
Where craftsmanship disappears, this soil disappears.

Today we live on a poisoned Talmi earth, together with the growing throwaway industry, with the associated throwaway directors and their throwaway salaries.
Can art be compared to craftsmanship?
Art is a craft - and its content is merely a commission for the craftsman in question.
Whether it becomes art depends on the character training, the talent of the performer.
Anyone who wants to learn to think - and thinking is a craft - should learn to think the difference between Maulpertsch and Makart, the difference between Wotruba and Breker.
Art lives with this distance. Did our artists after 1945 know about the change?

Did they suspect that printmaking would become disposable, that the art trade would become a graveyard, the graveyard of the young masters? That the reproduction would win, the cast, the forgery? That fluorescent tubes and television light would become our light, that our museums would no longer have daylight for the pictures painted during the day? That the art cards would be more appealing than the originals, that color blindness could increase? And so on.
Shouldn't our governments, our politicians, our artists have known all this?
They say that knowledge is power.
But first, knowledge is duty.