You can die from kitsch. And we’re close to it.

Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.

The connoisseur’s hushed, museum-trained gaze is not well-designed for these purposes. That gaze values subtlety, complexity, ambiguity, and irony. Its most characteristic grace note is self-congratulation at being the kind of person who likes this...