Only elitism can save the high arts

Those working hardest to save civilization are destroying it fastest

I have a close friend whose life’s work has been a failure.

He is an accomplished art historian and a liberal. His great project has been, for decades, to get minorities interested in the old masters of European painting.

He’s a leading expert in the field, deeply passionate, and has raised significant funding from well-known benefactors. And yet his project has accomplished nothing.

He has failed because he understands pieces of art without understanding art itself.

Individual pieces of art can be beautiful, and one can understand the skill of the artist, and explore their history, beliefs, motivations, and context. It can take a lifetime of study to recognize these details.

But art itself - fully encountered - cannot be appreciated in this distant and intellectual mode. A raw encounter with great art is a personal initiation into belief; a direct flow of beliefs too subtle and complex to be written on the page. It is to be pulled into a torrent of culture and history, faith and emotion. This is intimate and intense, and possible only when there is a deep resonance between the soul of the artist and observer.