Tom Wolfe, social satirist and best-selling author, was on hand the evening of November 28 at the Asia Society in New York to give the second of this year’s four “Distinguished Lectures on American Art and Culture of the Twentieth Century” sponsored by the Whitney Museum’s Department of Public Education. The series’ three other speakers are Leo Steinberg, J. Kirk T. Varnedoe, and Robert Hughes. That Wolfe is not as serious—or, to use the Whitney’s term, “distinguished”—a thinker on art as his fellow lecturers was a fact not lost on the small audience in attendance, comprised almost entirely of Whitney members and art-world people. Nor was it lost on the Whitney sponsors themselves. Russell Connor, the Whitney’s Head of Public Education, facetiously remarked in his introduction that, as he spoke, the movie people were backstage negotiating with Wolfe for the film rights to The Painted Word (1975), Wolfe’s one-hundred-and-twenty-page “debunking,” as the jacket copy of the paperback edition says, of the “phonies” behind the “great American myth of modern art.” “We’ve signed Jeremy Irons to play Leo Steinberg,” said Mr. Connor, in effect banishing Wolfe from the world of art to the world of pop culture. When Wolfe bounded onstage, dressed in a white three-piece suit, Mr. Connor’s anecdote rang even truer.

In the elegant brochure describing the lecture series, Wolfe’s title was the rather staid “The Big Shift: Changes in Artistic Taste in the Final Fifteen Years of the Twentieth Century.” But Wolfe in his opening remarks