Primaprimaprima
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User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
11hr ago
Why should it start there? Bullshit political signaling seems obviously endemic.
Because the alternative is to simply think, as you already said, that your opponents are your "enemies for life" and there's nothing to be done about it. Then the discussion is truly just reduced to nothing but political power struggles. Sounds a bit... postmodern, doesn't it?
I take Scott at his word that his immediate, honest experience of the Chesterton poems is that he experiences them as surpassingly beautiful. That doesn't mean that I think that someone's "immediate perceptual experience" should be taken as an unanalyzable, unquestionable primitive. We could then go further and ask why he has that experience, how he came to be the type of person who has that experience, how it stands in relation to his other beliefs and his other psychological traits, etc. And someone could of course perform a similar analysis on me to determine how I came to hold the views that I hold. But the important thing is that, on a certain level, I really do take Scott's word for it that he just likes the poems because he likes them. I'm not coming into it thinking that he's just saying that he likes those poems because he has a political angle. I think everyone should extend that same level of charity to everyone.
Primaprimaprima
11hr ago
Christ withstands His culture’s priests and academics (scribes), empire, false accusations, and so on to obtain Glory. This is modeled by the believer who “carries his cross”, denies himself, loses his life to find it.
Part of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity (and Buddhism, and stoicism, and etc) is that a lot of things that appear to be or are alleged to be examples of "self-denial" or "self-overcoming", actually aren't. In the majority of cases on Nietzsche's view, followers of various religious and philosophical traditions are just doing what they were naturally going to do anyway, just with some elaborate post-hoc rationalizations to make it sound more impressive. You need to look at each individual action in each individual case to determine whether it's actually coming from a place of strength or weakness.
For example, a guy who's already having no luck with women, and who then proudly declares himself to be MGTOW because he wants to "focus on himself", inspires no confidence. It's not an accomplishment, he's not "denying" himself anything, because he already had no ability to procure the thing he's allegedly denying himself in the first place. Similarly, showing mercy and love to your enemies is only impressive if you actually had any other options available to you. Refraining from crushing your enemies is only a display of strength if it's actually difficult for you; that is, if it's more difficult for you than simply crushing your enemies would be.
The Cross model can produce a JS Bach, who explored the limits of mathematical-music science while keeping beauty in mind, while his culture already moved on to different musical fashions (the fugue was not in vogue).
He never said that it was impossible for Christian civilization to produce great individuals, or that there were no great individuals who were Christian. Otherwise, he would have had to fully discount ~2,000 years of European history, which he plainly didn't. He did think though that by the time he arrived on the scene, Christianity had already completed its own self-overcoming, and it was time for it to be transcended (at least as far as higher individuals were concerned).
To this day, not a single good thing has ever come from Nietzsche or Nietzscheans.
Nietzsche produced the most beautiful prose writing in history (and it's barely even a contest). That's already a pretty staggering accomplishment, even before you get to the actual content of his thought.
Primaprimaprima
15hr ago
I'm not sure if I can pick something about your linked work where I can say the same? Can you elaborate on that a bit?
I like the color scheme. I like how strangely ambiguous the image is: the figure floating in a strange artificial space (or maybe a "space" that's not-actually-a-space), he looks like he's looking at something, expectant about something, but we don't know what. The image feels "compact" in a way that's oddly comforting.
Primaprimaprima
15hr ago
Nietzsche never grasped Christianity.
How so?
Primaprimaprima
16hr ago
You're kind of just doing what I warned against in my post though. "No one could really be into this stuff. We all know what 'beauty' is, after all; so artists must just be screwing around because they don't have anything better to do". I explicitly disagreed with all these points. You're still incredulous that people could be pursuing "modern art" because of their own intrinsic interest in its own intrinsic aesthetic value.
Obviously something historically unique did happen in the late 19th/early 20th century that changed the trajectory of high art. But that was due to many competing factors and isn't just reducible to "linear perspective was solved". Nor were modern artists the first artists to do anything weird/experimental: see for example Hieronymus Bosch.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
Angelus Novus is a beautiful painting in every (authentic) sense of the word, and only philistines think otherwise
Scott just published Contra Everyone On Taste:
Last year I wrote a piece on artistic taste, which got many good responses from (eg) Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition. I tastelessly forgot to respond to them until now, but I appreciate how they forced me to refine my thinking. In particular, they helped me realize that “taste” and “good art” are hard to talk about, because the discussions conflate many different things [...] I will take the bold stand that conflating many different things is bad: it frees people from thinking too hard about any particular one of them, or the ways they interact. Here are my arguments for deliberately ignoring about half of these.
This post is a followup to the earlier Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste. It seems that the track of the discussion went roughly as follows: Scott was reflecting on how the tastes of art connoisseurs (either self-proclaimed or credentialed) tend to a) differ sharply from the tastes of the much larger mass of non-experts, and b) show a preference for art that the majority of people consider to be ugly or incomprehensible. He essentially argued that the opinions of the "experts" are grounded in bullshit status games, political power struggles, arbitrary fashion trends, etc, while normal people are free to enter into a more natural relationship with artworks that are actually beautiful and pleasant:
Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and the “kitsch” art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules.
When people responded to the post and argued that people with more "elitist" tastes actually are responding to features of artworks that are both objectively real and deserving of attention, like the artwork's historical and social context, philosophical content, etc, it eventually prompted Scott to respond with his latest post.
He argues that many of the proposed features of artworks that are allegedly worth appreciating, like the art's historical context or its position in an ongoing artistic dialogue, are essentially extraneous, and will only serve to hinder one's natural and immediate appreciation of the art's "sensory pleasures" (or lack thereof). He really seems to be pushing this idea of a pure and natural response above all else, abstracted away from any possible considerations of context. I think this dialectical maneuver of his is ultimately grounded in his incredulity that anyone could actually, really enjoy the types of "weird" artworks that art elitists claim to enjoy. I think he thinks that if he can just cut off all of the "escape avenues" for the mustached hipster -- "no, you're not allowed to talk about the history of this or that movement, or the artist's biography, or the dumb pseudo-philosophical artist's statement, you have to just look at the thing itself and tell me what it actually looks like" -- then the snob would be forced to admit defeat and admit that, yes, when you remove all possible external variables and immerse yourself in the pure visual experience (or aural experience or whatever), it actually is just a dumb ugly looking thing. At which point Scott could claim victory and his assertion that the snobs were never worth listening to in the first place would be vindicated.
His incredulity is on display, for example, when he discusses Benjamin's essay on Angelus Novus:
I’m not usually one for art history, but Benjamin has caught me. As a writer, I tip my hat to him: I will never compose a paragraph this good. If Angelus Novus can spark commentary like this, surely it - and the artistic project itself - is deeply valuable.
Except that I guarantee you that you will not be prepared for the actual Angelus Novus painting. Whatever you imagine it to be, it’s not that. I read Benjamin’s commentary first and I Googled Angelus Novus second, and I thought somebody was playing some kind of prank. Better if I had never seen it, and had kept the beauty of Benjamin’s prose unsullied in my mind.
I've actually brought up this painting once or twice before on TheMotte in the context of other art discussions, always to the same perplexed reactions. I'm quite fond of this painting, and I couldn't just let Scott dis it like that, which is part of what compelled me to respond to this post in the first place.
Scott raises a number of interesting points and arguments throughout the post; I'd be happy to discuss any of them individually, but, I don't think that a point-by-point breakdown of the post would actually be persuasive in getting anyone on either side of the fence in this debate to change their minds. So for now I'll settle for the more modest goal of trying to dispel some of the incredulity. Yes, I am a real living breathing human who thinks that Angelus Novus is authentically beautiful. Not for any particularly "intellectual" or "contextual" reasons either. This is, as far as I can tell, simply my "natural" response to the painting (as "natural" as one can get anyway, seeing as one's "natural" response is always already impacted by one's life history, cultural upbringing, background philosophical assumptions, etc). Similarly, my "natural" response to the Chesterton poems that Scott loves so much is that they're, well, I have to break out the word he dreads here: kitschy. I'm not even saying that to be mean! Either to Scott or to Chesterton. I have no agenda here (or at least, whatever agenda I have, there's a pretty large chasm between it and the agenda of the modal blue-haired MFA student). I'm just calling it like I see it. (Full disclosure, I only sampled a small selection of Chesterton's poems, and I'm not much of a poetry fan in general to begin with.)
An honest dialogue should begin with the recognition that people can have idiosyncratic or even "elitist" tastes that aren't just based on bullshit political signalling. Scott would of course be the first to acknowledge that "taste is subjective", but I'm not sure if he really feels it in his bones. He's still looking for the angle, looking for something that would explain why all these ivory tower types have seemingly conspired to convince everyone that these obviously-ugly artworks are actually good, because surely no one could just simply believe that. Of course it would be utterly naive to suggest that politics and fashion play no role in "high art" trends. Of course they play a prominent role. But at the same time, they're not the only factor. It shouldn't be surprising that the types of people who dedicate their lives to becoming artists or art critics would also tend to converge on certain idiosyncratic aesthetic tastes, naturally and of their own accord, due to whatever shared underlying psychological factors drove them into art in the first place.
One of these "underlying psychological factors" might simply be the desire to grapple with the complexities of aesthetic experience as such, and a willingness to allow oneself to be transformed by that experience in radical ways. Scott treats "sensory pleasure" as essentially an unexamined, irreducible primitive, the bedrock of certainty that would be left over once one has abstracted away everything "extraneous": as though it were simply obvious to oneself when one finds an artwork to be "pleasant" or "beautiful" in the first place, as though it would be impossible or undesirable to call these modes of experience into question, to become unsure of and estranged from one's own perceptual experience. Tellingly, he does include "Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You" as one of his markers of artistic quality, but suggests that it may be "emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making." But, the authentic work of art opens up the possibility of transforming what you experience as delightful in the first place, what you experience as a "valid point" in the first place. Conceptual groundwork of this nature calls for phenomenological experiences that are multilayered and complex rather than merely "pleasant"; it calls for engagement with the world and other people.
For understandable reasons, non-leftists get anxious whenever anyone brings up words like "historical" or "transformative" in relation to art and culture; any call to be mindful of "context", especially "political context", is seen as somewhat threatening. For decades in the West, these concepts have all been associated with the forceful imposition of leftist political strictures and leftist assaults on traditional (especially religious) culture. "You're asking me to 'be open to' being 'transformed' by art; so you're asking me to allow myself to be transformed by these people? The ones who run our universities and art galleries today? Really?" I'm not saying that your concerns are entirely unfounded. All I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be this way. Recognizing that art is ineluctably embedded in its social and political context is intrinsically neither left nor right; a more holistic way of appreciating art that goes beyond simplistic notions of "art for art's sake" can and should be reclaimed.
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
So I am tempted to ask what, if anything, is inherent in communism which results in this type of behavior.
It's not that there's something inherent in Marxism*. Rather, it's that Marxism was built by, and continues to attract, the types of people who already have a preexisting psychological disposition to suppress ideological dissent and view it as threatening. You see the same dynamics (that is, the dynamics of ideological suppression and the fear of wrongthink) play out everywhere from indie video game circles to "serious" leftist political organizations, it's plainly one and the same underlying phenomenon at work.
(* The notion of "communism" in general predates Marxism specifically, but, the Marxist and Marxist-inspired ideological strands are the ones that have been the most evolutionarily successful.)
Don't totalitarian rightist governments have a dim record on free speech too? Yes, but, it's different; it's subtle but different. Flipping things around for a moment, consider how Heidegger in his "Introduction to Metaphysics" lectures, delivered in 1935 (two years after the NSDAP came to power), argued that The Human Being As Such is ontologically grounded in "violence" and "struggle". I view this as an authentic expression of "the rightist mind" (or at least, a particular subtype or strand of it), and I view this as a legitimate difference between leftists and rightists. A committed Marxist simply wouldn't think or say that; even though they have engaged in a great amount of violence themselves in good conscience, and even though they have a certain degree of libidinal investment in the continuation of certain struggles that they claim to want to bring to an end. For all that, they are still not invested in the abstract concept of struggle itself; it doesn't structure their imagination in the same way. And this is part of what makes them leftists in the first place, and ultimately structures all the really-subtle-but-still-clearly-there differences in the ways that leftists and rightists think, talk, organize themselves, etc.
Analogously, rightists will suppress dissent for all sorts of reasons; because it's tactically the best move, because they legitimately believe that the target views will cause great harm if left to proliferate unchecked, because they simply take pleasure in the fear of their enemies; but they won't do it because they love suppressing dissent as such. The mind that loves struggle needs, first and foremost, enemies to struggle against. The mind that loves peace would rather see their enemies simply disappear into the mists of time. Or the mod queue.
Primaprimaprima
4mo ago
cottaging isn't a standard behavior
It’s obviously standard enough that there’s a word for it.
Primaprimaprima
4mo ago
I asked them what spiritual experiences they had which convinced them of their religion’s truth. One described to me that in high school she was in danger of failing her physics class right before the final exam. She prayed about it and felt an intuition that she should go to the professor and ask him for any extra prep materials, she interpreted this intuition as the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Upon visiting him he supplied her with some additional practice tests which she credited with helping her pass the class.
How far we have come from St. Paul on the road to Damascus.
Primaprimaprima
4mo ago
Taking a step back, if PTSD was common this seems impossible.
Could have just been a mistake on my part! I don't have the historical expertise to weigh in further.
I do know that the concept of "war neurosis" was known to Freud, so the concept at least predates our "modern" (post-WW2) culture.
Primaprimaprima
4mo ago
"Trauma" As Poetry
Recently I've had cause to interact with a number of zoomers and zillennials, and on several occasions I've been asked "are you traumatized?" or "do you have any trauma?", as though this were a perfectly normal question to ask someone, and not some weird fuckass question. I respond, in all seriousness and without any irony, "no, and in fact I would dare to say that I've never felt any pain at all. My life is unreasonably beautiful, beautiful enough to think that something is amiss. What did I do to deserve this? How long will God let me continue with my selfishness before He realizes that the debt must be paid and the balance corrected?" (This usually kills the conversation.)
It's tempting to tell people that they don't know what real pain is. But the man of science seeks to explain, not to judge. When there is a psychological difference between individuals -- on the one hand, individuals who proactively endeavor to see themselves as "traumatized", who know how to take advantage of the appearance of weakness, who derive a secret pleasure from reliving every slight and wallowing in every painful memory, and on the other hand, individuals who resist the category of Trauma and who feel that the ground will fall out from underneath them if they do not project an image of strength at all costs, who are enticed by the idea of "invincibility" (regardless of the underlying material reality), who have no way of measuring their own worth without the presence of inferiors to serve as a foil (and before you draw any hasty conclusions, there are plenty of men in the former category and women in the latter) -- it is natural to wish to inquire into its origin. Why the difference? Whence?
I don't mean to deny the reality of PTSD, symptoms of which were recorded in the medical literature as far back as ancient Greece, as a mechanistic biological response to extreme injury. But the contemporary concept of Trauma is different -- it requires no specific observable pattern of behavior or disability, only the attestation of the individual. Human lives were historically filled with a great deal more famine, disease, and death than they are at present, but solemn intonations about how the weight of your personal burdens have permanently impacted your ability to lead a tolerable existence were comparatively rare. Thus we can infer that the concept of Trauma, as well as the practice of the telling of the traumatic narrative, are the results of historical and social processes -- created, not eternal.
Recently there was a post on the front page about how time seems to flow faster as you age. This, as far as I can tell, is a human universal. The author's further claim, however, that "childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that is difficult for the rest of life to match", is rather not a human universal. You find this out quickly when you start to ask different people how they subjectively relate to memory and the passage of time. For some, there is an unbroken chain of continuity between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood -- they've had the same underlying "essence" the whole time, it's all equally real and vital, all part of the same process of development (and you might naturally expect childhood memories to be particularly important under this model, since it is childhood that lies at the origin of this one chain of being). For others, the leaps and breaks are more discontinuous, salience is determined by different criteria. In my own case, the "center of narrative gravity", the center of narrative vibrancy, is a sliding window that mainly focuses on the last 5-10 years, and the further back in time you go, the more it feels like those memories belong to a different life entirely. I have been "born" several times, and probably will be born several more.
There is a great deal of individual variation in the perception of time, not only in the speed of its flow, but in its global geometry, its peaks and valleys. For some, there is a constant tension as the past and future continuously try to contract themselves into the present to form a single point; for others, no such issue can ever arise, because only the present exists. You can collect memories like documents in a file cabinet, taking great care of your ever expanding and carefully organized collection, or you can collect them like drops of water in a bucket, letting them become indistinct as they swirl around and blur together. For many individuals, there is a deeply felt sense that they just are the specific narrative weaved together by happenstance out of the various incidental concrete events of their lives (as opposed to say, being a disembodied Cartesian cogito, or a set of abstract principles for reasoning and operation, or an anointed soul with a unique destiny, or...); this is where their center of being lies. Memories, even seemingly trifling memories, or memories that would be better off forgotten, leave deep indentations and are constantly revisited and tended too, because it is just this fabric of memories that constitutes the fabric of subjectivity itself in these cases.
We can now offer the working hypothesis that those who find it appealing to organize their experience in terms of Trauma (as opposed to the menagerie of other concepts we have available for navigating suffering and dissatisfaction) are those who experience exactly this kind of subjectivity. The traumatic narrative would then be the personalized expression of a deeply felt subjective truth, a unique perspective on the world given form and made manifest in material reality -- in other words, Art. And the public telling of the traumatic narrative would be a communal art form to supplant earlier and outmoded forms like the folk song or the heroic myth. Whereas earlier communal forms, often in closer alliance with religion, focused on general abstract truths or the history and destiny of the community as a whole, the traumatic narrative places the contingent individual and his contingent narrative at the center -- and why shouldn't it? It's perfectly in line with the historical shift announced by Descartes and Kant, the transition from ancient and scholastic philosophy to modern philosophy, the abandonment of Virtue and Being in favor of Freedom and The Subject. There should be no concerns about the decline of culture; culture only changes forms, taking on new appearances that would seem strange and foreign to earlier eras. Everyone is an artist and everyone has the means to share their creations, which turns contemporary discourse into an assemblage of the bountiful fruits of the imagination.
Again quoting the author of the previously linked post:
The first set of new firsts that children give you are those you don’t remember from your own life, smiles, laughs, food, words, steps, first rain, first creek. Every week becomes so laden with meaning that it is almost oppressive. Instead of worrying that the weeks are all forgettable, as you might have in your former life, you instead worry that you will forget. They won’t remember it, so the burden falls on you. You are recording the events that will become the mythology of their identity when you later tell the stories back to them.
Everyone has their own personal mythology of course, but not all mythologies are constructed in the same way. For some, everything of mythological significance is on the sensual surface of the event; for others, the event is mere material for the construction of an original narrative. And other mythologies are just stillborn. Broader theories of cultural dynamics are impossible without first getting clear on the functioning of these mechanics on an individual level.
Primaprimaprima
4mo ago
Actually no! Just a natural at it. ;)
Primaprimaprima
4mo ago
You have a very uniquely identifiable writing style. Your posts are among the most memorable that I've ever read on TheMotte.
I can assure you that the LLMs make your writing weaker, not stronger.
Primaprimaprima
4mo ago
more consistent than analytic philosophers
Can you elaborate?
Primaprimaprima
5mo ago
Please do recommend this place to other people. We’re small enough that we really need the exposure. If they come here and then they don’t like it or can’t follow the rules then you can say well, guess it wasn’t meant to be.
Primaprimaprima
5mo ago
People on the left are by and large much more focused, in my experience, on experiential states, following the heart, and of course contemplative, mystical spiritual practice. [...] I think that the left I've broadly sketched here represents chaos, and the right represents order.
But isn't it the exact opposite?
Ok, maybe not the exact opposite. But it's more complicated than any 2D schema would suggest.
Leftists are not anarchic chaos agents. In fact committed leftists are inordinately concerned with order, justice, fairness, morality, and so forth. "We must stop Trump at all costs to defend American democracy" is order, not chaos, even if you think it's an order that's based on faulty reasoning and ulterior motivations. "Yeah let's let the reality TV star become President and see what happens" is chaos. Ironically, self-identified anarchists often have a fetishistic preoccupation with structure, discipline, and power. The responsibility for actually enforcing this discipline is "distributed" (or so they claim) in order to avoid individual culpability, but the underlying structural dynamics are clear.
The dream of Marxism is a fully transparent social order grounded in pure reason. It's irrational that billionaires get to own multiple yachts while there are still people who can't afford medical care. We can use our brains to figure out a more fair way to distribute resources, instead of leaving it up to the irrationality of the market. There are no limits to what the unfettered human mind can accomplish. That's the basic impulse.
Of course, you might start to question how "rational" your opponents really are, if you think they're tenaciously holding onto premises that are incoherent or have been falsified. But, naturally, they would just turn that back at you and say that you're the one who's reasoning from incorrect premises. So we're back at square one.
Rejections of leftist utopian ideals are ultimately grounded in a rejection of the infinite power of reason: there are limits to how much reality can be rationally known and managed, there are things that can't be controlled or changed, etc.
(And while we're on the subject of Jordan Peterson: femininity is obviously order, and masculinity is obviously chaos. Wild how many people get this wrong.)
Primaprimaprima
5mo ago
1189 comments at the time of this writing, which is close to the all time low but we've had a few other threads in the same neighborhood since the site migration. Around 1500 has been the average for probably over a year now.
Primaprimaprima
5mo ago
I did make a bunch of posts about it a while back, but I lost interest after it became clear nothing was going to happen and I haven't followed anything UAP related in like a year lol.
Of course if we do get confirmation about something genuinely anomalous then that would be wonderful!
Primaprimaprima
5mo ago
If you consider Nick Land rightist, he’s a hardcore accelerationist. (Honestly I’m having trouble thinking of who else would even qualify as a “rightist philosopher” these days but that could just be my own ignorance.)
Primaprimaprima
5mo ago
you're going to go with "it undermines the human soul", huh?
It’s a thankless job, but someone’s gotta do it.
The left absolutely hates AI.
I don't think there's an especially strong correlation between political orientation and attitudes towards AI. Rather, anyone on the left or the right can be pro-AI or anti-AI, but they'll do so for different reasons, giving us four basic quadrants:
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Leftist and anti-AI: it's spreading misinformation and eroding job opportunities for academics, writers, and artists, constituencies who tend to lean overwhelmingly left (rarely will they phrase it so bluntly, but that's clearly one of the major underlying motivations).
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Leftist and pro-AI: it's contributing to the democratization of knowledge and creating new opportunities for intellectual and artistic expression for the differently abled.
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Rightist and anti-AI: it's a threat to traditional values, it undermines the human soul, it's a Satanic deception designed to lead us astray from the path of righteousness. This quadrant is populated, but it might be the smallest quadrant. There aren't as many people here as I would expect, and the people who are here tend to skew older (think Alex Jones and Fox News talking heads). I've noticed that a lot of hippy-dippy types who are into astrology and healing crystals and etc are actually surprisingly gung ho about AI, happily using it to generate book covers, using it as a teacher or conversation partner, etc, which indicates to me that something has gone wrong in my models (in fact the few people I've seen who analyze and criticize AI from a "humanistic" angle tend to be leftists).
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Rightist and pro-AI: Elon Musk, Nick Land, tech bro accelerationism and utopianism, fuck yeah worker ownership of the Memes Of Production, we can finally generate infinite videos of Trump defecating on Mexican immigrants without relying on commie art school students. Popular on /pol/ and among the young right more broadly.
Primaprimaprima
5mo ago
I remain perpetually confused as to how a group of Tough Minded Rationalists™, who believe in the invisible hand of the free market and facts over feelings, can be so concerned about birth rates.
Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.
Why so much ire over nature taking its course? Any attempt to engage in large scale social engineering that would cause civilization to deviate from its current course in order to force it to align with an abstract values framework starts to sound a bit... socialist-y.
Primaprimaprima
5mo ago
Weird. It's just imgur. And I promise it's perfectly SFW!
Conveniently, I was just thumbing through Nietzsche again due to my discussion with coffee_enjoyer:
Regarding the broader art world:
I don't deny that there's a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering in the "high art" world; but, I don't think anything in my post committed me to denying that either.
I have no particular attachment to the particular art institutions that we're stuck with now, and I agree with you that art could survive and flourish without them.
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