Here he had to get up and readjust the convex lenses, so our conversation was interrupted. When he was back at the easel I asked him why he said Futurism had no future. He said because it lived by innovation; it did not develop gradually, like the mind or the tastes of a man as he grows up, but found its successive inspirations in continual revolt from the latest fashion: “it’s a series of kicks,” he said, “like the old petrol tanks.” That meant that the public simply didn’t care about pictures, because they—the laymen—hadn’t leisure to follow all the latest movements in art criticism. In the old days you took years to learn how to paint a picture, and only a fortnight to learn how to criticize one; now it was the other way about. Only artists looked at pictures, and they chiefly to see how they could invent a new method, and turn the old ones on to the scrap-heap. “They didn’t always succeed,” he explained. “You’d be too young to remember the commotion there was in the early thirties, when nobody would talk about anything but relativity, and Manning Barker suddenly laid it down that there could be no such thing as Truth, even in Art, without velocity. His school would only paint for the screen, and you had to sit for a quarter of an hour to see the portrait of a Cabinet minister. I remember Lady Marrett, who was a beauty in those days, being released in nearly a quarter of a mile of film, and you never saw more than a square inch of her at any given moment. It was hard for the sculptors, you see: they wanted Billing to do an avenue of statues up the old Hammersmith Broadway, but the police wouldn’t allow it on account of the cars having to go forty miles an hour to get the values properly. Some of the movements fail, and some stick, but it can’t go on like this.”