Jed Perl makes that case in TNR, arguing that the “erosion of art’s imaginative ground, often blamed on demagogues of the left and the right, is taking place in the very heart of the liberal, educated, cultivated audience — the audience that arts professionals always imagined they could count on”:
It is relatively easy to point to the deformations of art at the hands of politically correct left-wingers and cheap-shot moralists on the right, as the late Robert Hughes did in the fast-paced, witty series of lectures that he published as Culture of Complaint in 1993. It is far more difficult to explain why people who pride themselves on their carefully reasoned view of the world want to argue that art is not a value in and of itself, but rather a vehicle or a medium or a vessel through which some other human value or values are expressed. That these thoughts are often voiced indirectly makes them no less significant. Indeed, such thoughts may be all the more significant because they are being expressed by critics and scholars who would deny that they are in any way discomfited by the unique powers of the arts. An illiberal view of art is gaining ground, even among the liberal audience.
Alyssa finds common ground with Perl:
I sometimes find myself heaving sighs at pieces I once might have written myself, like Vox’s recent offering “The Bachelor franchise is sexist and needs to go,” from reporter Kelsey McKinney. Of course “The Bachelor” franchise is grotesquely, bizarrely sexist. The entire conceit involves generating drama by making its cast go through intensified versions of antiquated courtship rituals and making them feel bad for themselves if those rituals do not produce a happy result. But in keeping with Perl’s objection, I think we ought to be a bit more careful about declaring that culture “ought to go” on the grounds of its politics. …
[T]here is something suspiciously anti-competitive about the idea that something should go away just because it has bad values. It is an impulse akin to the hope that a politician you dislike will be indicted or caught with a person not their legal spouse, eliminating the need to actually beat them at the polls. This is an end run around figuring out why people like what they like. It suggests a lack of confidence that liberal values will be compelling and a wish to ignore the reasons that something retrograde can also be extremely popular.
Dreher nods along:
Perl is addressing liberals in a liberal magazine, but his point is universal. True art cannot be reduced to the sum of its creator’s parts. It comes from somewhere particular, but it will have achieved the quality of universality that allows it to stand alone from its creator. Your understanding of Dante’s verse is far richer if you understand the historical, theological, and philosophical sources of his vision. But his lines are no less beautiful and true absent that understanding.
But Mostafa Heddaya sighs that Perl “seems, as usual, to be at war with straw men”:
Like much of his criticism, Perl here seems to be talking to no one in particular, bellowing at the present from an oblique angle. And for someone drawing from the ambered debates of modernism, it seems deeply strange for him to blindly assert that emotions are not political, or that politics cannot be emotional. And without getting into an intellectual history of art criticism and history (a subject intelligently surveyed in a recent article by Ingrid Rowland in The New Republic), which might explain a turn away from the belle-lettristic art discourse he seems to advocate but not adhere to, Perl’s recycling of antique arguments under the guise of contrarian thought is tiresome.
The Dish 