NotebookFebruary 2001 Walsall redux A response to his critics & the furor occasioned by “Crudity beyond belief” (September 2000).
In the September 2000 New Criterion, I published an article
about the town of Walsall and its fantastically bad new art
gallery (“Crudity Beyond Belief”). I passed what I thought was an
uncontroversial aesthetic judgment upon that unfortunate town,
namely that it was very ugly.
Had I suggested that Akron, Ohio, was not the Paris of the Midwest, I doubt that it would have caused much stir even in Columbus, Ohio, let alone in the nation as a whole, but such is the unutterable small-mindedness of England, and such the inward-looking, trivial, and contemptible nature of its media of mass communication, that when the unimportant news that I had described Walsall as being “like Ceausescu’s Romania with fast food outlets” finally spread via a wire service, I was for a day or two the object of public vituperation and personal abuse that was both absurd and mildly sinister. In the space of a few ho ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 19 February 2001, on page 78 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/walsall-dalrymple-2264
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