What is the point of state-sponsored mediocrity in the arts?

Michelangelo Buonarroti wasn’t a great painter, per his own admission, especially compared to his contemporaries and students, Caravaggio and Raphael. He wanted to…

A new monument to the First World War is a worthy addition to the best of Washington’s memorials.

No museum should subordinate its art and the artists to momentary politics.

Fetishes are ruling the day in the world of performance art.

Modernists believed the world's systems, styles, and traditions needed to be completely reimagined and reinvented, in hopes that the human condition would be radically…