View from Notre-Dame: thoughts

Personally, I love paintings, photos, and most traditional, 2-D art.  I've always admired them, mostly just for beauty's sake, but always knowing in the back of my mind that art should always be striving to be something more - to start a revolution, incite social justice, enhance today's world.   This chapter, as well as what we discussed in class yesterday, bring out another important purpose that art can aim for - personal changes, revolutionary or conforming.  These individual tweakings collectively can influence a city, a society, a culture.  Haussmann was able to do this through his work, and in this sense even the traditional, two-dimensional art that depicted Paris is very powerful and moving.  

It sort of bewilders me that one man did so much to bring on modernality, and to change "old Paris".   I wonder if people nowadays are still capable of pushing that change single-handedly.   And who those people will be?  Which realms are more influential - city planning? health? entertainment? politics?  It is interesting to see how different facets of our lives have risen and fallen in importance and influence when compared to the 1800's.  More interestingly, will our modernality of today be seen as a delightful progress or a blind and confused decline?  The chapter also emphasizes a very separated and stratified class system in the city.  I know that in the 21st century, especially some place like Berkeley, we've all been trained to be pc, but this gentrification definitely still exists in our world.  I feel like fewer artists and less attention in general is being drawn to this.  Are we actively choosing to ignore it or are we just bored with depicting the same social problems and contrasts in art?