Why was Richard Avedon a pretentious lightweight, and why was Geoffrey Beene a great designer?
Why is it a journalistic rule of thumb that the best writing is on the sports pages?
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" 'Some things people can afford, some things people can't,' said Bloomberg, whose estimated personal fortune is $4.9 billion...
Over the past five years, the city funneled $65 million in taxpayer money to help fund MoMA's expansion."
Link from C.T..
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The art world, like the social cultures of opera and ballet, involves not only the money of the powerful but their taste. For all the pretensions of modern art, its displays of contempt were directed most often not against the rich but the middle class. American academics have never understood the snobbery [elitism- better] of the continental thought they've championed. The European critique of the bourgeoisie doesn't begin with Duchamp, and it doesn't end with Foucault. The fact that this culture is now represented by the nouveau riche is simply another reason to understand why film, like literature based on the economic power of a large percentage of the population, is the most important visual medium of the present and future. Art, as such, is now defined by conservatism and jealousy: wanting both its MTV and a sense of superiority it has not earned.