Art as Diplomacy - Cultural ambassadors act as envoys for what's best in America.

New Yorkers who walk into the oak-paneled Carnegie Club on West 56th Street will encounter a now unfamiliar scent--cigar smoke. The club, which is one of a few legal cigar bars in a city gone smoke-free, has nostalgia written all over it: musty bookshelves, waitresses who don't carry the drinks themselves but are followed by tuxedoed men who perform that service, and, most of all, Cary Hoffman and the Stan Rubin Orchestra.

The importance of culture to the advancement of conservatism is frequently overlooked in our political discussions. The arts have become so corrupted in recent years, that we frequently look elsewhere for tools to support our educational system and our diplomacy. The author points in the direction of Matthew Arnold, whose Culture and Anarchy is the seminal work on this subject. This is a topic with which Conservatives need to rekindle their conversance!

Good luck, the art world is completely ruled by the Limo Lib/Vanity Fair/PBS crowd. I would even argue that what they put forward is not American culture but rather a sickly parody of it. In fact what they want to do is bring down American "culture," or at the very least us it as a propaganda vehicle.

American need to develop its own "high" cultural forms, a process that was going on prior to the 60's but got co-opted by the Socialists.

I would argue that the "high" culture of America is actually Science, not the arts.

In any event you will not have an American "high" culture until you get public monies out of it, and that includes nonprofits.

Lastly, one has to ask if a secular and allegedly democratic culture can produce or even requires "high culture."

Lastly, one has to ask if a secular and allegedly democratic culture can produce or even requires "high culture."

Good point. We may need to look back to the arts created in a less secular time and rebuild on that foundation. Personally, I'm OK if we forget all about Jasper Johns, Arnold Schoenberg, and William S. Burroughs.

Well that was not the point I was making but I could not agree more strongly with you on your point.

All great "high" art has its root in religious worship. When it does not it becomes "the cult of the pleasant sensation." J.S. Bach once said something to the effect that "if music is not about praise of God then it is just so much infernal scrapping and blowing." I think that that captures well what I mean.

There is another element to "high" culture that is more chilling: It requires a aristocratic audience that has the leisure to appreciate the nuances of the expressions of that high culture. Europeans love to praise their "culture" but it is not really their culture - it is the culture of the old aristocratic regime of Europe. This is perhaps the most clownish aspect of modern Socialist elites. They seek to become a new aristocracy on the ashes of the old order and pawing through the ash heap they hold up some bauble that they found as there own accomplishment. But they are not a natural aristocracy - they cannot create a civilization but only pick at the bones of the old one. As I have said before, they are like children up in their parents' attic trying on adult clothes. Or perhaps they are like peasant ransacking a Manor house, or perhaps like monkeys rampaging through a museum - they have little knowledge of how their booty came to be or why it is there. This applies to our Socialist elites as well.

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