Tag Archives | art

“If You Want to Be Stupid, I Can Be Stupid as Well”

Commentary by , July 28, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. He Who Lives by the Federal Waiver Dies by the Federal Waiver The one really clear achievement of the Trump administration has been its anti-regulatory campaign, particularly its stunning reversal of policy at the EPA. I would like to see more of this made permanent by congressional […]

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Jim Kirk Was Many Things, But He Was Never a Social Justice Warrior

Feature Article by , May 25, 2018

It has become commonplace these days to lament that we don’t have a common culture anymore—a repertoire of art that we can all enjoy regardless of our political loyalties. Well, maybe it’s because we have a lot of people trying to mark off parts of the culture as their tribal territory, off limits to partisan […]

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Art for Whose Sake?

Feature Article by , May 23, 2018

I’ve been tracking the growing PC didacticism of contemporary culture and some of its more extravagant recent manifestations. (That was about a music video whose status as PC propaganda has been cemented by the narrow restrictions placed on how others can reference it or comment on it.) What strikes me the most is how mainstream […]

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Weaponized Classical Music

Commentary by , May 21, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. I’m Sorry, Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Let You Do That A while back, I warned that big Silicon Valley companies like Google depend on an implicit social contract in which we agree to let them have access to a bunch of our data, but with the […]

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America’s Carnival Barker

Feature Article by , May 16, 2018

Tom Wolfe died yesterday at age 88, after a long and colorful career as America’s carnival barker. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. The carnival barker has a certain reputation for brazen dishonesty in overselling his product. (We’ll get to that in a moment.) But he is also our enthusiastic guide to a […]

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The Art of Balkanization

Feature Article by , May 11, 2018

I argued a while back that the increasingly dominant character of the art championed by our cultural elites is didacticism: “an absence of substantial or profound artistic content, compensated for by loud, didactic political messaging. We know what we’re supposed to feel, whether or not the work of art actually makes us feel it.” By […]

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The Age of Didacticism

Feature Article by , January 26, 2018

My plan for the Culture War is that culture wins. If we have people trying to promote competing values, and we always will, at least they can promote them by creating interesting and worthwhile cultural products—art, architecture, novels, poems, movies, television, etc.—that entice us with their unique vision of how we might choose to live. […]

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Five Things You Need to Read Today

Commentary by , January 23, 2018

Here’s your weekly update, for subscribers only, drawing your attention to five stories that are worth catching. Today, the main theme is the way in which our culture is substituting Politically Correct didacticism for real enjoyment. 1. Bad Faith A running theme of the last year has been balancing the good and bad of the […]

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In a Mirror, Darkly

Feature Article by , October 4, 2017

I have finally made it through the third episode of “Star Trek: Discovery,” long enough for the plot to settle down enough so I can evaluate whether the show matches up to my hopes. All I can say is that somebody on this show had better Grow the Beard and do it soon. This is […]

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Weimar America

Feature Article by , May 16, 2017

A bunch of “alt-right” neo-Nazis decided to stage a torchlit mini-Nuremberg rally in my town. Or maybe it was supposed to evoke a Ku Klux Klan rally instead of Nuremberg. It’s kind of hard to tell the difference. Ostensibly, they were protesting the proposed removal of statues of Civil War heroes Stonewall Jackson and Robert […]

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