In another thread, started by Mark, Shark defends two serious assaults on the very viability of art after Modernism—or, to put more accurately, to art after a particularly conservative view of Modernism. This one sees formalism as estheticism. Thirty years ago, Hilton Kramer found that embodied not in Pollock or de Kooning, whom he despised, but in Marsden Hartley. It amounted to the politicization of contemporary art as a mirror of the culture wars that conservatives keep fighting, long after most culture no longer cares. Shark singles out for praise two recent rear-guard fighters, Jed Perl and Roger Kimball. The first has the advantage of actually knowing something about and liking art, as well as keeping his own views on politics largely to himself.
Books from conservatives on how ideology (presumably not their ideology) have led to the decline and fall of civilization extend well beyond the arts, but I usually feel compelled to review the ones that do fall in my field. It is like one of those video games or Bop a Mole, where you kill them but they keep popping back.
Here's what I have, for example, about Kimball, Perl, and a Times article several months ago, and I have a several part attack on a new one by John Carey in progress, with a second installment today. Because Shark raises the book, let me excerpt just a bit from my review on Kimball's The Rape of the Masters. I argue for a special kind of political art, in which the political really is the personal, as part of a personal direction important elsewhere in contemporary art as well.
. . .
I am not a political columnist. I shall merely state my own conviction that I write, just days after the November 2004 election, in the wake of yet another disaster that art failed to prevent.
Can art do better? Must it? Anna Somers Cocks seems to think so. "Why," she demands, "is art not reflecting world events?" Her article, from The Independent for June 17, 2004, sees "no artistic engagement with the big, threatening issues that hang over us." It looks even better in print journalism's headline font. 
If Cocks cannot find political protest anywhere, Roger Kimball, managing editor of The New Criterion, sees it everywhere. "Increasingly," he claims, "art history is pressed into battle—a battle against racism, say, or the plight of women or on behalf of social justice. Whatever." His new book, The Rape of the Masters, denounces a supposed cabal of leftists that has taken over art history and driven out the art. "What," he wants to know, "has happened to the main event?"
Choosing sides
Surely both cannot be right. They beg one to choose sides in a crucial debate, a debate as familiar from politics as from art. The debate concerns the very possibility of art at the intersection between personal expression and the public sphere.
In politics, the left wants the excluded to speak, while its proclivity for self-consuming debate can easily make any speech inadequate. On the right, the rhetoric of McCarthyism has translated effortlessly into a world without even a Red menace: a powerful enemy still lurks and still determines every response. As in politics, too, the dissemination of Kimball's new book, through articles, excerpts, and interviews in his own and other publications, reflects the cool efficiency of the conservative media machine. And, just as in politics, all too many people tune out the whole thing.
Naturally art and politics often have some of the same dynamics. Postmodern and feminist assaults have done well to hit art institutions hard. That includes not just museums, but the styles and personalities associated with representation and Modernism alike. Meanwhile, one after another backward-looking introduction to art promises a respite from the culture wars, in the simple comforts of Romantic expression, pleasure, and plain old good taste—which I myself have been trying in vain to lose for years. And all the same, the art market grows, museums expand, audiences follow suit, and it takes a determined mind to care about disputes at the edges. A site like this one can hardly avoid tracking all those issues month after month.
And that, I want to argue, is exactly how art does choose sides—by getting down to work, work that no critic can honestly disentangle from the world. For all their differences, Cocks and Kimball share a curiously literal and sadly conservative view of art and ideas. Both see politics and ideas as necessarily remote from personal passions. Both see politics as about choosing sides and art as about seeing both sides of the story, and both find those incompatible. One writer wants to recover the connection between politics and art, and one wants to sever it. They should ask instead whether artists in this world can ever avoid it.
. . . and I hope you'll read more!