"And regardless of my parents’ intellectual defense of the pleasures of art, in their case mostly of literature, it was clear they saw their understanding of it as something higher than the thing itself. Their relation to art was condescending; they thought of artists themselves mostly with contempt. Like Fried and his mentor Greenberg and all the propagandists they opposed, my parents began not with art or history but with Modernism as defined above, and with philosophy. But the relation of the fine arts to philosophy was more complex than they imagined, given their old shared relation to political and religious authority. The claimed superiority of philosophy, like theology, has been that it is not fiction. The same’s been said for painting, if said only recently by Jews."

The history was always implicit, and maybe thats why I never made it explicit.
Maybe a little awkward. Fix it later.
Still waiting for the publisher, so why not:  PDF