Don’t bother to go see Todd Haynes’s horrible pretentious mess of a movie.

Munira Mizra does an admirable job of defending contemporary art against the bogus charge that it is left-wing:

It’s very easy to be anti-Bush these days, but try being anti-recycling. You’ll be branded a heretic and lose your friends in high places very quickly. Indeed, there is hardly any artistic critique or satire about environmentalism, even though the majority of people in surveys feel deeply ambivalent about being hectored about flying, carbon footprints and so on. Never mind Jerry Springer: The Opera, or even ‘Mohammed the Opera’ (if any artist would dare to do such a thing), Al Gore is practically crying out for his own musical! The artist Mark McGowan is one of the few artists who has managed to spoof environmentalism. … Why isn’t there more of this in our age of supposed irreverence and playful postmodernism?

Good question!

In my own view, most art—and I use the term reservedly, for the general culture—is politically incoherent, and dumb. Very unsophisticated stuff. Tired. Lacking in ways to explain the world we live in today.

Or are our artists, as Mizra suggests, simply afraid to go there?

[T]here’s plenty of anti-war art out there …, but where’s the pro-war art? It’s a minority view, but it’s intriguing that for all its spirit of experimentation and shock, no one in the arts is prepared to explore this argument further. And with all this concern for community art, there are a few communities that never seem to get much airtime. In the 1980s there were lots of agitprop plays about the impact of mine closures on working-class communities, so where are the plays about the end of foxhunting in the countryside? Most obviously, where is the satire about radical Islam or the ultimate attack on political correctness? When an issue so dominates in the media (and has, potentially, so much comedy value), why hasn’t anyone really touched it?

Another very good question, and I commend Ms. Mizra for raising it even if the larger artistic (and critical) community in the West, such as it is, does not.

Oh! I forgot! They’re too busy disapproving of Salman Rushdie!

Kudos busted out all over for Norman Mailer after he died a couple of weeks ago. Buried in the mountains of ink was this gem

Aside from his command of the English language, there really isn’t anything magnificent about this guy.

A fitting epitaph. Mailer might have chosen it himself!