UNFINISHED BUSINESS

A few weeks back I posted a reader's e-mail letter to Arts Journal editor Doug McLennan which objected to the "political invective" in Straight Up. That posting, "Thou Shalt Not," prompted several more e-mails from the reader, this time to me.

He explained he "did not object to [my] writing about the mixture of art and politics." He objected to "nakedly political comments disguised as arts comments, with only a thin veneer of material to disguise" them. He felt that posting the costs of war in Iraq was uncalled for because it was irrelevant to the arts. It was "partisan" rather than merely "political."

I believed the root of his objection was itself partisan. "I don't think you would have been upset had I criticized Bill Clinton," I wrote him. "Am I wrong?" He replied, "I might hate Clinton, but I hate insults more." And he admitted: "Upon further reflection ... it wasn't that you were being political or not political. ... The straw that broke the camel's back was your comment about recalling GW Bush [from office]. I thought it was a pretty unfair thing to say ..."

So why am I going over all this now? Because I promised him I would air his correspondence. He pointed out, among other things, that he's "a highly educated and cultured person" and "a little tired of hearing all the people in [his] educational class sneer at everything. Conservatives condescend, and leftists sneer."

He no more appreciated "reading the condescension in The New Criterion or The City Journal" than "reading the sneering everywhere else." He considered himself "a centrist and a utilitarian" with "a severe dislike for ideology of all kinds." He also pointed me toward "an art show that's not only political, but explicitly so." Regettably, the show -- a group exhibit called "Politics as Usual" at the Aaron Packer Gallery in Chicago -- has closed. But here it is online and very much worth seeing.
 
Finally, with all due respect, I feel compelled to say that no card-carrying centrist utilitarian would admit to knowing of, much less reading, The New Criterion or The City Journal. OK, I read The New Criterion myself sometimes. But I'd bet he is really a dyed-in-the-wool conservative with centrist utilitarian sympathies, possibly even a registered Republican, who despite being "a highly educated and cultured person," as he so modestly put it, somehow managed to vote for Gee Dubya Shrub and is miraculously not yet disillusioned by Shrub's distorted Christian ideology of spare the rich and soak the poor.

Dept. of Correction: After this item was posted, my correspondent asked that he not be identified. Accordingly, I've deleted his name. For the record, I mistook his given name for his surname. He has my apology.

He also asks that I not understand him too quickly. (His way of putting it is that he feels he's being made a straw man.) He says he's as familiar with The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, Dissent, Mother Jones, and the New Republic as he is with The New Criterion and The City Journal. He reports that his only magazine subscriptions are for arts magazines: Art in America, ArtForum, ArtNews, Modern Painters, and Art & Auction, plus Architectural Digest, and Opera News (via his long-standing membership at the Met Opera). And he reads the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, every day.

Further, he says he has never joined a political party, though he did vote in a Democrat primary, for Paul Tsongas, in 1992. As to his political tastes, he says he has bought and read more books by Christopher Hitchens (two) than by Ann Coulter (none). He says he has never purchased any other books by political or semi-political authors and prefers to read fiction.

To complete his self-profile, he says he's a big fan of painters Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jackson Pollock. In music, he enjoys the occasional Messiaen piece. His favorite authors are Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and Robert Coover. He has also written Amazon.com reviews for books by Coover, Anne Carson, Ian McEwan, André Gide, Georges Bataille and Don DeLillo. And he wonders whether a Republican would have even read any of the books he reviewed, much less given them positive notices.

Frankly, I wish he'd told me all that in the first place. He doesn't say whether he voted for Gee Dubya Shrub, though, and I'm not about to ask. Even someone who believes he's been made a straw man (though I don't believe so) has a right to privacy.