Weird, I thought it was a great article. One that actually gets better as it progresses. I don't see how it's fluffy at all. In the first half, he is mainly re

Weird, I thought it was a great article. One that actually gets better as it progresses. I don't see how it's fluffy at all. In the first half, he is mainly referring to the current state of fine-arts, which is still in the grip of the "originality disease". It's a different way of describing a particularly outgrowth of modernism, the rejection of bourgeois values, which included conformity, propriety, and the existence of objective truth and beauty. The horrors of World War 1 were the turning point, how could something so grotesque arise in the pinnacle of civilization after all. The author mentions the influence of Freud's work, which absolutely demolished the collective psychic order, turning everybody into a neurotic. Interesting too, is that he really highlights the self-absorption which underlies modern/contemporary "high" fine arts. That criticism is not new. The first real critical assault on modernism was in the seventies. However, it didn't stick, instead it turned ideals of bourgeois respectability into a form of pageantry. Think a critic like Tom Wolfe as an anachronistic dandy, or the weird Lego-classicism of postmodern skyscrapers. But the core of that criticism stands though: a half-century later, and we have still not overcome the absolute degeneration of artistic production. I hope to see by the end of my lifetime that we have dug out of this hole, and art is unabashedly the pursuit of truth and beauty again. That will require artists and their patrons to stop navel-gazing though.