What gets to be called art?

This is sort of the man on the streets constant question of what makes this art.

Yes.

Show me that you have learned to see, that you have learned, you have taught your hands to trace what you are seeing in order to teach us ordinary mortals to see the world with a greater sense of appreciation and to perceive beauty where we might have just overlooked it.

The interesting question is not whether Object A is a work of art or not, but is it a good work of art?

Beauty, sometimes it can get confused with

the merely pretty, but that's not what we mean. The history of aesthetics and writing about art and

beauty was done with a greater sense of confidence, a lesser awareness that authority disintegrates

all around us.

And you could assume certain judgments were true

about what was beautiful, what was merely pretty.

I feel like we're all now children of relativism,

of multiculturalism.

We can't forget what we know.

Welcome to Socrates in the city here in New York City. I'm Roger Kimball. I'm joined by my friend Heather McDonnell. I am the editor of the New Criterion magazine, a cultural monthly here in New York, and also the publisher of Encounter books, a broad church conservative publishing house.

We have many important authors, including Heather McDonald, many others, and I scribble away from time to time here and there.

I'll let Heather introduce herself. Thank you, Roger. My name's Heather McDonald. I'm a fellow

at the Manhattan Institute, which is a think tank in New York City, that was a willing and delighted participant in the reclamation of New York City in the

1990s. And it's a delight to be here and to discuss really, for me, the most important thing

in my life, which is the need to continue to promote and be grateful for the wonders of American

art and Western art and civilization.

Yes, so our topic today is the arts. What's happened to the arts? Why are they important? Are they important? Do people think that art is important? I think it's an interesting question. Clearly, in some sense, we think they're important. We spend gobs of money building museums, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars.

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