I think the June issue of the New Criterion represents the conclusion of the magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. If so, it ends on a high note with articles including Roger Kimball’s “Why the art world is a disaster.” Roger takes as one of the two epigraphs for his essay a sentence from Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution:
Some of what she said was technical, and you would have had to be a welder to appreciate it; the rest was aesthetic or generally philosophical, and to appreciate it you would have had to be an imbecile.
As the epigraph suggests, Roger’s explanation of why the art world is a disaster — particularly with respect to “the domestication of deviance” — applies beyond the narrow world he discusses in the essay.
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