“On the boulevards two men are carrying some immense gilded letters in a handcart; the effect is so unexpected that everyone stops and looks. There is the origin of the modern spectacle. The shock of the surprise effect. To organize a spectacle based on these daily phenomena, the artists who want to distract the crowd must undergo a continual renewal. It is a hard profession, the hardest profession.”

—Fernand Leger, from the essay The Spectacle: Light, Color, Moving Image, Object-Spectacle, 1924, quoted in Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939, edited by Christopher Wilk, 2006.