Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 At the same time, Taylor was feeling more and more frustrated at Williams, where he felt hemmed in by academic convention. "None of these things were ever picked up by the institution," Taylor says. In 1998, the University of North Carolina offered Taylor a new technology center of his own. Enter Herb Allen. It isn't the technology part of the story, but the Herb Allen part, that people who know Mark Taylor or his work find stupefying. Allen, a second-generation Wall Street titan, a secretive figure who has earned a fortune making investments and brokering deals, is a veritable J. P. Morgan of our day. Taylor is a child of '68, a radical who sees through all structures of power, very much including capitalism. How could they make common cause? What could one infer about the new world that was arriving from the fact that they had made common cause? I visited Taylor not long ago in the hope of gaining some insight into this odd convergence. Taylor lives in a modern house perched at the very edge of the mountains, though he works in a converted barn in his backyard. He had a work in progress sitting on a table in the studio: two boxes filled with little silver canisters labeled "Pound" or "Kandinsky" or "Balzac." Inside each canister was a thimbleful of dirt or grass taken from a great man's grave. Taylor is collaborating with a photographer who has gone all over the world documenting the grave sites of the 150 most important artists and intellectuals of the modern era -- Taylor's private Valhalla, an intellectual's reliquary with a hint of kitsch. It was an art project designed to explore his favorite themes. "It's kind of the flip side of this whole cyber thing," Taylor explained. "Our obsession with the palpable, with remains." We yearn for the actual as life becomes more virtual.