Arts & Letters

Art and the Left

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I am not an artist but I do try to appreciate art where I can find it. I visit museums and particularly like the Milwaukee Art Museum, with its famous rooftop “wings”. The site is almost as interesting as the art inside its walls.

Much art, however, is aimed at a strange insular world of elitists. The arbiters of taste for art are generally on the coasts and inevitably extremely liberal. To say that their tastes are out of the mainstream is a vast understatement.

This article, which I clipped from the Chicago Tribune book review about 6 months ago (sorry, it sat in my “blog folder” and I recently found it) inadvertently captures this elitist gap with a non-ironic subtitle:

“Photographer Gregory Crewdson’s America is filled with people and places that reflect life at its most hopeless”

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Ancient Wisdom

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A paraphrase of Beowulf (starting around line 1383).

Beowulf said “We must mourn our friends later; they have died, but we have not yet avenged them. While we live, we win whatever victories we can; so now let us hunt the monster, whether its trail lead through the middle of the earth or the bottom of the sea.”

The monster is hiding, but heroes are hunting it.

No Parking

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My friend Nathan and I differ greatly in our perspective of how and when film crews ought to be allowed to close off parking in the maze that is Manhattan’s Chinatown. You can catch some of our debate here and here.

What it comes down to for me, as a libertarian, is that the film studios are using the coercive power of the state to force (see if the police won’t clear away any protests before you object to my use of the word “force”, especially if the protestor is a lone businessman) the neighborhood into accepting something that will benefit the private film company, and a minority of the businesses there. The difference from the Suzette Kelo case is only a matter of degree.

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