On Tuesday, the New York Times published this article interrogating the apparent absence of a cultural factor in the upcoming election. Speculation as to why candidates and cultural figures have yet to join hands on the platform - and why cultural funding, though not imperiled, is not partisan-promoted either - provides an egress, however, to deeper waters. Asks the Times, does the diminished political role of culture reflect a greater diminution of the cultural role of culture?

If you count yourself among the many in the vernissage cake walk, such a pronouncement seems bloated. Still, it does not take a Trollope to note the proportion of the crowd lingering on the sidewalk, Campari-a-sipping and Interval-a-rolling, to those inside the galleries or, slimmer still, engaged in aesthetic discussion. Just as the crucible of haute cuisine has arguably hopped the channel, so may have the pith of contemporary arts, in spite of well-attended gallery promenades.

The Times credits the Brits' modernized venues, free national museums, and museum-gallery synergy with a cultural revival expressed in energized audiences and a global market share seven times that of France. Is it due to the chasm between high art and popular culture, an ingrown conservatism, a dearth of tabloids, or is it the artists themselves who are culpable?

If you're like Parisist, you'd fain blame the Man, but that very same recent vernissage run on Saint Claude intimates a more difficult diagnosis. What is the State of the Arts, after all, when so few contemporary artists get beyond pretending to undertake aesthetic risk? One sees too much trash without the stink. Then one wants to locate the problem not in the conservative but in the non-committal, on behalf of the artists who create and the viewers who excuse.

Photo by ClydeHouse on flickr