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Of course not everyone was celebrating the dynamism of the modern. In 1909 Arthur Symonds wrote:

"London as it is now is the wreck and moral of civilization. It is the machines more than anything else...the creatures we see now in the machine are hardly to be called human beings, so they are disfigured out of all recognition...Does anyone any longer walk? If I walk I meet no-one walking, and I cannot wonder at it, for what I meet is an uproar, and a whizz, and a leap past me, and a blinding cloud of dust, and a machine upon which scarecrows perch is disappearing at the end of the road"...

(But look! Even Symons is in vogue despite himself, for what a wonderfully futurist image this is!)

But he goes on to say of the wretched Londoner that he has:

"infinitely less sense of the mere abstract human significance of life than the facchino..on the Zattere at Venice, or the girl who carries water from the well in an earthern pitcher, balancing it on her head, in any Spanish street." (This is the same kind of idolization of instinctual peasant life that is one of the most irritating features of D.H. Lawrence.) How long, you wonder, would Symons have lasted as a Venetian porter? how many pitchers of water would he have wished to carry at the age of ten? Symonds was writing in the same year as the Manifesto of Futurism. It is not hard to imagine what Marinetti would have thought of Symonds comments on the automobile, or to gauge his irritation at this slack, "dolce far niente" peasanty vision of Italy, his own country.

We should be grateful to the Futurists. For what artists first come to mind when we think Modern Art. Matisse, Picasso. And here is the question: where are the machines? Did Picasso…oh so modern….ever paint a car, a factory?. Were not these artists (so innovative in form) thoroughly reactionary in content…same old nudes, same old bottles, same old guitars…what? This was modern art? Where was the twentieth century?
OK the Italian Futurists were a dodgy bunch artistically, politically, in terms of sheer organic form not innovative; but at least they did modern art.

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