In Quadrant, Dalrymple revisits the work of the late Oxford professor John Carey, whose trajectory from justified attacks on literary snobbery to a wholesale denial of aesthetic distinction strikes him as a philosophical error.
Art does not make us better, but it makes the world better for us. Try to imagine a world completely without it! It is true that a great deal of art that is now produced is valueless, or indeed worse than valueless, insofar as it detracts from the world as a home for humanity, but that is because artists, critics and some section of the public have gone over to the idea that anything can be art because there is no dividing line on the continuum.