Conservatives frequently point out that the media, Hollywood, and the coastal elites don’t cover or understand regular people. But is this also true of conservatives? Have we also retreated into our bunkers? When was the last time Matt Walsh went to a bookstore, a movie, or an art gallery?
I recently attended the Gaithersburg Book Festival. It’s one of the premier book festivals in America, and this year was no exception. There were books on topics from fashion to politics to World War II, novels of every description, and tables and tables of books for kids. I met and interviewed Keith O’Brien, the author of Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird. Heartland is a wonderful book about the struggles a young Larry Bird had to overcome in the 1970s before achieving basketball immortality. Author O’Brien treats the people of French Lick, Indiana, where Bird free up, with warm curiosity and genuine respect.
In the same week as the book festival, I visited Glenstone. Glenstone, about 20 miles outside of DC in Potomac, Maryland, offers, as the brochure says, “a holistic experience of art, architecture and landscape.” Founders Emily and Mitch Rales took 300 acres and added two gallery buildings and several outdoor sculptures. “The museum also wants to provide you with a relaxing environment fit for contemplation of its thought-provoking pieces of art,” the guide adds. “If you’re looking to be truly immersed in both mind and body during a museum-going experience, Glenstone is the perfect fit.”
The Glenstone offers an amazing collection of modern art. Past exhibits included pieces by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, and Barbara Kruger. Also Man Ray, Ming Smith, and Henri Matisse. A current exhibit is called “Ties of Our Common Kindred.” From the website: “Opening on February 12, 2026 in the Gallery, Ties of our common kindred will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The presentation will celebrate some of the most significant achievements of American artists over the last century, with iconic artworks from Glenstone’s collection, including key examples by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Ruth Asawa, Kerry James Marshall, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol. Together, these works represent styles and voices that have influenced generations of artists working today.”
If that’s not enough, I’m hosting an Anti-Communist Film Festival this year. This will be an annual event that attracts freedom-loving young filmmakers.
I get why conservatives complain about the culture, but I also still have that rambunctious 1980s teenager inmate who says: Stop complaining and do something about it. Seriously. Conservative kvetching has grown intolerable.
The Gaithersburg Book Festival, the film festival, and the visit to Glenstone provide times when I find myself wondering if American culture is really as bad as conservatives say it is – or if we are so deeply sunk in a culture of complaint that we don’t leave the house. In fact, art is ubiquitous in a way it never has been in any culture at any time in history. Art is in comic books, in video games, in movies, in graphic design, on the walls of our churches, and as close as your phone. It’s not that it isn’t there, it’s that we have very bad or ideological gatekeepers who are more invested in shoving Stephen Colbert in our faces than Herman Melville.
Furthermore, woke leftist art has become a joke. In 2024, leftist art critic Philip Kennicott encouraged artists to annoy President Trump. Kennicott then named an artist who inspires him – Andres Serrano. Yes, Mr. “Piss Christ” himself. In 1987, Serrano submerged a crucifix into a jar of his own urine and photographed it. It was blasphemous and idiotic. Serrano apparently is still around, and Kennicott is ready for him: Serrano in a new work has “created an installation of Trump images, collectibles, artifacts, all manner of ‘Trumpiana’ in a New York project he called “The Game: All Things Trump.”
When “Piss Christ” appeared in 1987, I was in college. That’s how long Serrano has been mini this bit. Left out of Kenncott’s essay is the famous Podesta art scandal. In 2016, it was revealed that the art collection of DNC officials Tony and John Podesta was demented, bizarre, and even evil. The Podestas’ collection contained, as critic Michael J Pearce described it, “weird genetically-mutated piggy-children sculptures and creepy photographs of men with children running away.” People were “shocked to learn that this pillar of the Democratic Party owned a sculpture of a decapitated naked woman whose pose closely resembled a photo of one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims. Another installation in [Podesta’s] home included hyper-real sculpted hybrid human and pig figures, including piglet children.”
Pearce goes on: “Suddenly, a powerful perception of a sick relationship between left-wing politics, avant-garde art, and pedophilia was established by media outlets covering the story.”
This stuff even offended democrats: “Intersectional Democratic Party members were horrified that the taste of Podesta — one of their elite leaders — could include such offensive things. Party leaders seeking the middle-class vote were appalled at the offense to bourgeois values. The sculpture of the beheaded woman clearly offended feminist factions.”
Pearce saw this as one factor in the undermining of liberalism as the historical champions of great and modernist art. The other was how Leftists have become philistines:
Instead of supporting art, left-wing intersectional activists have become busy iconoclasts, calling for the destruction of a painting of Emmet Till, throwing paint at public sculptures of Columbus and civil war monuments, spray painting slogans onto the iconic Unconditional Surrender statue in Sarasota. There’s nothing particularly new or exciting about iconoclasm, but it is unusual that the political motivation of these activists is leftist, because supporting artistic freedom of speech has been the default position of the American left since the Second World War.
In his book The Triumph of Modernism, the great art critic Hilton Kramer argues that when modernism emerged in the 20th Century, the more conservative middle class embraced it. Housewives and normal Joes liked Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Edward Hopper, Odd Nerdrum and Alex Katz. Kramer, one critic observed, “insisted upon Modernism as an essential component of bourgeois culture. He admires Modernist art and has less patience for the artworks made after Modernism, which he tends to interpret in terms of decline or degeneration.” Contemplating Matisse, Kramer observed, “It is hard to believe that we shall ever again witness anything like it, now or in the foreseeable future.” Today, instead, we endure “the nihilist imperatives of the postmodernist scam.” Bingo.
Yes, average, normal Americans understand and love beautiful art. We are also surrounded by it – on murals, in video games, in movies and books, in car design, in church. We are able, as Elon Musk, X, and the conservative media have done, to be our own curators. We are free to ignore the garbage championed by Philip Kennicott and the Washington Post.
Earlier this year I purchased one of my favorite objects of art. It’s a Carver skateboard featuring a gorgeous design from the German Bauhaus school of the early 20th century. I took the board to Glenstone. I had art on the American skateboard I was riding, art in the novels in my backpack, and American art surrounding me on the grounds of Glenstone and on the walls. It was a gorgeous spring day, and people were smiling.
Things aren’t that bad, folks. Go outside.
Editor’s note: We now have the room to run outside commentary by some of our favorite and most provocative thinkers on the Right. That only happens because of the support of our readers, who ensure that we have the resources to keep providing an independent platform and independent voices in a sea of Protection Racket Media domination.
Help us maintain that fight! Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
