Mitchell explains the three fold effect of landscape paintings as “emancipation, naturalization, and unification,” demonstrating the strong effect that they can have on western society. Mitchell even goes on to say that landscape is a medium for “cultural expression” responsible for historical shifts in western society. Thus making it a medium of modernism as well, based on the definition of modernism as an aesthetic and cultural response to modernity. But is it the landscape that acts as the medium for shaping “cultural expression” and modernism, or is it the way the landscape is depicted in art? Mitchell seemed to refer to landscape and landscape paintings as if they were synonymous. Landscape is certainly a visual experience, but I would differentiate it from artwork in the sense that it is natural scene where as the painting of the landscape is a man-made scene. In a similar sense, a landscape could remain relatively the same over the course of a century, but the way man depicts it through his artwork could change greatly. The cultural and societal changes that occur are connected to the change in artistic expression of the landscape, not the landscape itself. Therefore landscape in the natural sense is not directly acting as a medium for “cultural expression,” rather it has the ability to (indirectly) effect a society through the way it is expressed through various art forms.