The New Philistines

What happens in Artforum doesn’t stay in Artforum, and the result is that for many people in the West, all thinking about culture has been reduced to a single mental reflex: art is worthwhile if it validates the narratives, identities and feelings of ‘marginalised’ groups or, conversely, lays bare the injustices of the ‘mainstream’.

And this lot is more dogmatic than any crusty Victorian snob.

The difference is that, to gain a foothold in the establishment now, one has to profess solidarity with the marginal (that really isn’t all that marginal) and enmity against some repressive mainstream (that really isn’t mainstream anymore).

Quite simply, they have won elite culture.

For millennia, cultural establishments drew boundaries and played gatekeeper against rebellious ideas. Now the avant-garde rebels do the same thing, because they are the establishment.

was beaten and banished from the culture, or forbidden from passing judgement. It is the hard-left avant-garde and the identity politics hucksters who now dominate the elite institutions.

The average fellow on the street doesn’t care, if he ever did, while the moralistic bourgeois, the intended target of such art, has simply ceased to exist

If their English grammar sounds broken, it is because their creative grammar is, too, and the source of the brokenness is the same.

As you read, try to add the necessary ‘up-speak’ that is a hallmark of millennial talk, whereby a sentence that begins as a declarative is inflected into an interrogative at the end – e.g., I am writing this book so you can, like, read it?

Note everywhere the gratuitous pluralisation – ‘subjectivities’, ‘identities’, ‘histories’, ‘social contexts’, and so on ad infinitum – a linguistic tick, borne of the need to signal identitarian virtue: you’re in-the-know if you recognise that there is no single history or collectivity, that subjectivity is multiple, that identities can’t be reduced to one other and so on.