A cloud was on the mind of men and wailing went the weather

Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.

Science announced non-entity, and art admired decay

The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay.

What passes for art in what passes for our culture rejects beauty at every turn, sometimes from a misplaced desire to make art obey intellect, and sometimes from what appears to be an active hatred of beauty itself, an unwillingness to accept the states of soul the beautiful engenders – desire, awe, joy, gratitude, and wonder.

The cult of ugliness springs from nihilism and from a desperate wish to avenge oneself on the appearance of meaning and goodness in what the nihilist takes to be a random and meaningless world. Sometimes the nihilism is genuine: Sartre? maybe? Sometimes it’s mercenary: Lena Dunham.  And sometimes it’s a bleak and mirthless farce: Art Basel.

There’s a lovely self-aggrandizing theatricality to the entire charade: the more conspicuous Basel buyers do not go to Art Basel to buy bad art (though there’s plenty to go around); they go to Art Basel so that other people can watch them buy bad art. If you hate yourself enough to  get into a lot of conversations at the fair, you’ll notice that many people seem to be there for no other purpose than to assert their superiority over others whose taste prevents them from admiring public onanism and aesthetic rot.

Through that unhappy morass wades the silent majority, as it were, the throngs of decent folk drawn to the Beach by curiosity or by propaganda, all walking a little stunned through exhibition after exhibition of mediocrity if not outright pablum, too intimidated by the unwavering ipse dixit  of the self-appointed sophisticates to ask aloud the overwhelming question: is this really it?