Artists are not for the masses.

About a week ago, there was discussion on...an e-mail list about quilt art...about how everyone who wants to make or view art needs to learn to read and write graduate-level philosophy/political science/feminist studies critiques, because "that's the language of art." So much for ordinary people--art is not for them.

Browsing around today, I find an article by the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts:

Most American artists, intellectuals and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social and political consequences.

Read the whole thing. I don't agree with some of the politics of it--government shouldn't force people who want to watch basketball to watch ballet instead--but the part about pretentious intellectual artists elite-ing themselves right out of national cultural relevance? Oh yeah.

I expect this explains Thomas Kinkade, too.