As the editor of Arts & Letters Daily, the web's finest online compendium, Denis Dutton has driven more traffic to The New Criterion that any other source. So I hope I can reciprocate by sending a few readers to Denis's provocative (and accurate) editorial on the diminishing returns of conceptual artists like Damien Hirst. Denis's op-ed appears in today's New York Times and comes out of his studies in art and human evolution, the subject of his book The Art Instinct (which John Derbyshire
wroteabout for us, Roger wrote about for the TLS, and I covered for City Journal). Denis writes:
Future generations, no longer engaged by our art "concepts" and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.
The full article is available here.
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