I have already today done a piece linking to two SAU blog postings. Here is another such link, this time to my friend Bunny Smedley's review of this book.

I particularly like Bunny's teasing out of the relationship between art and politics:

Part of the problem here may simply be a case of double standards masquerading as something else. Because Kimball regards art as having an autonomous existence beyond, if not actually above, the stuff of politics, he presumably further holds that if, say, a radical socialist and a High Tory were confronted with an elegant society portrait by Sargent, the two ought to feel more or less exactly the same thing in front of it – that the socialist, certainly, should not feel anachronistic resentment of the world of wealth and privilege reflected in it, or worry too much about gender inequality or sexual politics, or obsess about issues of patronage and power. The Left-wing lexicon of political correctness, in other words, should not be brought to bear upon what's actually there (as Kimball would put it) in the painting. To which most of us would, I imagine, as much out of visceral dislike of political correctness as anything else, nod sagely and say 'fair enough'.

But what if the positions were reversed? What if, for instance, the same two viewers were placed before The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David? Would it really be incumbent on the High Tory to bite her lip and admire the indisputable formal qualities of the work – while at no point condemning it as a highly proficient, highly regrettable slab of morally unpleasant agit-prop, in which the iconography of a Christian martyrdom is placed at the service, by one of its more creepy if technically competent foot-soldiers, of a murderous and contemptible political regime? David, after all, personally signed death-sentences for something like 300 people, which makes his celebration of the demagogue Marat even harder to stomach. And anyway, he didn't intend his work to be admired in formal terms – he intended it to persuade us to take a positive view of Marat, the Jacobins and the politics they espoused. Are we supposed to forget all that when faced with a strong composition and a brilliantly schematic use of colour? Are we really expected to treat it on equal terms with, say, the Louvre's great Van Dyck portrait of Charles I? Is it somehow wrong to mention Sargent's politics, but right to mention Richter's?

Kimball would, I think, say yes: 'enjoy the work, eschew the politics'. We've seen that already. But there is, surely, at least another possible conservative position, in which it would be possible to comment on the political content of a painting (whether that apparently intended by the artist, or apprehended by the viewer) from a conservative, rather than from a socialist or liberal position. And here it is striking that all the instances of the 'politicisation of art' cited by Kimball involve critiques emanating not from the Right, but from the Left. Boime, Derrida, Alpers, Pollock, Clark: the politics they bring to the enterprise of criticism are no more attractive when focussed on visual culture than they would be were they directed towards, say, solving the problems of poverty or confronting the realities of social hierarchy. Indeed, it is hard not to suspect that Kimball has done this not simply because virtually all such attacks come from the Left anyway, but also because his audience might not find a conservative political critique as patently fatuous and factitious as a politically correct one, which is to say Left-wing one, must invariably sound to them.

As I've said here before, the SAU blog is your fully fledged Culture Blog, in the exact way that this blog is not. Culture with a Capital C. I do bits of Capital C culture, but not in a very Capital C manner, and of course, I intersperse it with personal flummery and chit chat, and my photos of course, and lots of other small c culture titbits about flat screen TVs, computer graphics, and such like. I absolutely refuse to make any kind of lunge for Internet hegemony. This here is not Clapham Junction, let alone Grand Central Station. That's not what I'm trying to do, not what this blog is for. But the SAU blog has real possibilities along those lines.

2 Blowhards is probably, still, the Instapundit of Culture with a Capital C Blogs, but suppose the SAU blog were to have the occasional posting (say one in every half dozen or so) with loads of links in it, to other cultural bloggage (much as the 2Bs do), then they'd have themselves a real Capital C Culture Blog well placed to hegemonise in all directions.