The Inarticulate Orator
4th August 2016
Steve Sailer looks at the Trump phenomenon.
We live in an era when billionaires seem compelled to buy artworks that few would like unless they had been apprised of the theory. Tom Wolfe pointed out in his 1975 history of modern art, The Painted Word, that the great creative talents of the New York art world were less the painters of the era—Pollock, de Kooning, and Warhol—than the critics—Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg—who had come up with the verbal justifications for why the paintings were worth a lot of money.
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Today, Trump doesn’t bother to read up on the intricate reasons he ought to buy, say, Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull sculpture For the Love of God for $100 million like an ordinary, decent plutocrat would who respects the values of his age.
Trump instead would rather buy an ocean-cliff golf course because it’s beautiful. He’d tell you that Hirst’s skullpture is ugly.
And he’d be right. Per Cochrane:
You adopt political ideas that are obviously stupid—because only a truly refined person can understand their subtle justifications…. Any lout might think that race exists and partly explains what people are like—only a sophisticate could steadfastly deny his lying eyes.