The media November 1999
Childish wish-fulfillment
Since my last essay in this space attempted to adumbrate the principle for would-be censors, we have seen a spectacular illustration of the truth that meaning depends on contextand of a characteristic political obtuseness in understanding it. In fact, the Sensation exhibit at Brooklyn Museum, discussed in detail by Roger Kimball elsewhere in these pages, takes us to the very limits of that principle, to the point at which there is no meaning apart from context. We have long been used to the postmodern definition of art, which is that art is anything displayed as such in an art gallery or museum. The context is all, the content nothing. Yet somehow it still takes us by surprise every time another collection of worthless junk is packaged as artgiven a contextprecisely so as to create a sensation: even when the packagers advertise their purposes by calling it Sensation. We seem unable to refrain...
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