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Dex Quire's avatar

Professor John, those of us who revere Literature - let's clear the decks and say Art - do not fare well with any tribe, Right or Left. On the Right: how many more essays by Roger Kimball do we need to read about how Western Civ was knocked off its axis because Marcel Duchamp mounted a urinal in the Armory Show? Shame, shame on all those decadent Modern Artists, Picasso, Pollock, et al., (the same revulsion towards Modern Art, by the way, that became Art-Policy under Stalin and Hitler)! I always want to say, "Roger, maybe the destruction of millions of young men across Europe during WWI had something to do with gutting Western Civ?"

On the Left: Sheesh, where do we start? Your Art (novelstorypaintingmusicplaydancesculpture) sucks because it neither excludes the over represented, nor includes the underserved while over marginalizing the marginalized clearly identified by the 46 letters of the alphabet ....

Woke: Creation of beautiful art can only come about when material conditions allow the luxury of time for superficialities built upon the backs of the working class.

Non-Woke: What about the beautiful cave paintings of Lascaux - when virtually everyone - man woman child - was involved in the foundation of survival? How did such beautiful painting come about?

Woke: [Something incomprehensible]

Both Right and Left conveniently forget that one of the projects of Art is to give us new eyes wherewithal to see, or reimagine, reality. The urinal, taken from its usual place and set in an art show does turn out to be pleasing in shape and design. The crucifixion bathed in urine -- keeping with the Left's exaltation of bodily egress -- turns out to affirm Christian Theology: Yes, Christ inhabited every aspect of man's bio-cycle -- hunger, thirst, sex, urine, poo, heck, he even died -- but he overcame death - speaking of Easter - thanks for the reminder Bob Mapplethorpe.

With this gift of Art the imagination flourishes, madness retreats; in politics, the reverse is true ...

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Blake Smith's avatar

While congratulations on the book coming out are of first order (after wishing you, and all, a Happy Easter) it's a combination of odd and troubling to see you--and Shullenberger--rather taking the unrelenting awfulness of Trump 2 as a sign of having been vindicated in your predictions/prescience/vibecasting.

As someone who was sympathetic to what I understood to be y'all's whole thing a few years ago, much of it seemed (and I thought reasonably so, in 2020-22) to be about articulating a critique of the contemporary left's excesses that was routed through, and thus in its own way a defense of, previously (culturally) left-coded 'grad school Theory'... a critique premised, as it turns out wrongly, on the percetion that the Trumpist right had been knocked out of action, and had never been as 'fascist' or threatening as it had been made out to be in the late 2010s. Now it seems rather that the most prescient people were the screeching MSNBC libs of 2015-6! Our awful political moment is strange stuff out of which to make a victory lap for the 2020-22 'Theory-against-the-libs'.

Not that I think the validity or interestingness of a thinker/writer depends on their being 'right' or able to correctly forecast (or call into existence) trends--if anything, the opposite. I think there's a risk too of narrating oneself as the one who knows the shape of the moment, or who know how the previous moment would produce this one. This seems, ultimately, to be the same kind of cultural criticism as the one that the vanishing Marxists used to practice, in which texts as 'interesting' insofar as the disclose the contradictions about to break open into the next stage of history...

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