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American intellectuals’ persistent attraction to the idea of a synthetic common culture, pulled together from the best bits of everything everywhere, seems to me like a displaced form of artistic ambition. It is Richard Wagner’s dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk that unites every art into an unanswerabl…

Born in the 1970s, I caught the very end of the culture Teachout mourns. My father spent years paying off a set of Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World on the installment plan. He read from it when he could, and eventually so did I. The set left me with the unfortunate impression that Home…

The blending of “high” and “low,” and the temptation of aesthetic relativism that comes with it, has been with us at least since the beginning of the twentieth century—when Henri Rousseau was acclaimed a genius for his ostentatiously naive paintings and the Surrealists found unexpected inspiration …

I do not believe that we manifest our own reality. The older I get, the less control I feel anyone has over anything, including the quality of one’s work. Outright fatalism tempts me, though I don’t succumb. In the realm of the arts, the realization that we can have deeply memorable experiences wit…

I watch bad movies, a pastime and a passion I have long shared with my father. When I was a child, we would sit on one of a series of couches scavenged from yard sales or curbsides, eating microwave popcorn while watching, say, Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) or Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1962…