Ian Marcus Corbin

This article was originally published on Spectator USA. It has been several decades since the art world – that swirling miasma of idealism, virtuosity, pretense and money – has recognised the men of the New York School, also known as the Abstract Expressionists, as truly great artists. Paintings by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning have long been in high demand, now more than ever; their canvases regularly fetch hilarious sums, well into the eight and nine figures. But that’s just the men. Paintings by their differently chromosomed colleagues have been going for a relative song. Now, thankfully, that’s changing.

Literary mandarin Zadie Smith has waded in deep this time. We’ll see if she’s allowed back to shore. Smith has been making troubling noises lately, letting off faint signals that her inner life might be insufficiently pasteurised and homogenised for the tongue-clicking clipboard huggers of the modern moral regime. In a Guardian interview conducted earlier this year, Smith said: “I can’t stand dogma, lazy ideas, catchphrases, group-think, illogic, pathos disguised as logos, shoutiness, ad hominem attacks, bombast, liberal piety, conservative pomposity, ideologues, essentialists, technocrats, preachers, fanatics, cheerleaders or bullies.

So much rap is outsourced id – music we play to put us in touch with deep animal parts of our inner lives, where we fight and fuck and flaunt our victories like civilisation never happened. The vast sums of money and creature comfort afforded to the play-actors are darkly poetic. Here’s the deal: you tell us about the grinding poverty, violence, drugs you came through and how you’re now rich as fuck, and we’ll make you so. Just pop out of your mansion every few months and remind us how the good life tastes when you’ve grown up hungry. We all want heedless, hedonistic triumph, but we’ll take it vicariously – we have jobs to hold down and mothers to please.

The day after Independence Day, 2018, the President of the United States shambled into a packed auditorium in Great Falls, Montana, and delivered these remarks, apropos the size of the assembled audience: “I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record . . .” Well, that’s as good an epitaph as any. Whoever’s in charge of the giant, gold-plated sarcophagus can sharpen the chisel and get carving.

In a sardonic email written last year to the New Yorker magazine, the late, great Philip Roth describes Donald Trump as a man “incapable of expressing or recognising subtlety or nuance...wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.” I enjoy the crankiness, coming from Roth, and I wish I could say it was wholly uncalled for. Our president, it can’t be denied, is a man little given to nuance, and almost charmingly innocent of any refinements of diction or syntax. This is a loss for us, if a survivable one. The world is complicated, and all things being equal, leaders who speak precisely and beautifully render better service to the citizens they represent.

You’ve probably heard that we’re in a boom time for the art business, breaking sales records as fast as we can make them. This might seem strange, in a time of such political uncertainty, but look closer: the art world is a fascinating canary in our cultural/social/economic coal mine, an odd liminal zone where profound reflection on the human condition is strung up on a white wall, and traded for increasingly wild sums of money.This ostensibly deep, meditative stuff, most often forged on dirty floors by spiritually hungry oddballs, is being gobbled up by real-estate tycoons, hedge funders and tech giants from every part of the globe, especially, lately, China and the Middle East.

The HBO program Silicon Valley has a recurring joke. Every time some eager young Zuck pitches a business idea, he caps it by promising to “make the world a better place” through whatever inscrutable software enhancement he’s trying to sell – “through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols”, “through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints . . .” and on and on. It’s pretty funny. Faux-philanthropy is not just for incel code-ninjas.

Some actors reach greatness via pure commitment – shedding pounds, adding them, living in character for months on end, all but transforming into the role they’ve decided to play. Marlon Brando, Christian Bale, Daniel Day-Lewis, and if I may hazard an addition (a somewhat non-traditional nominee), the United States of America.Can we nominate a whole country for an Oscar? A Tony? Can we do that? Can someone check on that? That’d be beautiful. You know what I mean? Beautiful. The best. Beautiful people, beautiful acting. Wow. For approximately the past two years, my country, or the better part of it, at least, has stared into the mirror, and feigned astonishment, as if candidate-cum-President Donald J.