Now all is to be changed. … All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
—Edmund Burke

Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else. … Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Early in December, The New York Times carried an art review about the work of the performance artist Carolee Schneemann, one of whose efforts, “Interior Scroll,” consists of Ms. Schneemann slowly unraveling a text from her vagina while reading it aloud to her audience. Two days earlier, the Timeshad carried a news story about Jubal Brown, a Canadian student, whose performance art consisted in vomiting on works of art that he considered “oppressively trite and painfully banal.” As of this writing, a Mondrian in the Museum of Modern