obscurity and obliteration

The demise of Wood pizza restaurant - seemingly an economic casualty, like so much - has left a torn postered, graffiti scarred, dead tree environment, which seems like a visual metaphor for so much about the country.  And there am I, trying to talk about the Ruskin-Whistler trial, aestheticism, and Pater's aesthetic beliefs all in one 100-minute segment (with class discussion in groups, in which they all battled with different segments of Whistler's Ten O'Clock lecture, quite successfully), and wondering quite how to make it speak to the state of things today, beyond dropping in some asides about being able to visit The Peacock Room, say, in the Smithsonian's Freer/National Museum of Asian Art, assuming the Smithsonian is still opening by the time they get there ... On the other hand, a class period talking about Victorian art is, at the very minimum, a little spell when I, at least, am not glued glumly to the news cycle (and yes, that case of tariff-beating French/Italian/Spanish wine arrives tomorrow from wine.com ...)