Tim Blair and commenters have been exposed - hopefully not fatally - to the auto-adulatory, terminally ironic world of Postmodernism. I survived extended periods of contact during my fine art undergraduate years by refusing, senior year, to do reading assignments, including an entire book. One professor gave up and let me stew through class while another - my favorite instructor, in fact - kindly referred to me as "theory-free." He coined this phrase in an introduction to the painting faculty as they stood before my work one afternoon. I was not close to any of the other professors, nor they to me; but I can't shake the impression that when "theory-free" settled in, the looks on their faces resembled those of priests whose soon-to-graduate acolyte has just announced that he doesn't really care for all that talk of holy men and transubstantiation.
I enjoyed painting, don't misunderstand: it was the insipid motivations for and meanings of painting ("Yes, it's a pretty picture. But why?") being foisted on me that drew out the rebellion. That favorite professor of mine knew theory, but his focus - and preference - was of Modernist theory. Paint. Line. Form. He never critiqued a single one of my canvases on account of what it meant, but on what the picture was doing. I loved that.
Nonsensical one-upmanship continues at its own peril. Want smudge marks on the bounds of absurdity? John Derbyshire responded in kind to the 2000 Turner Award-winning, Blue Ribbon farce, Martin Creed's Lights Going on and Off:
What do I think about all this? Well, first I think that the directors of the Tate Gallery, which receives funding from general taxation, should be locked up in prison and made to do hard labor scraping the rust off bolts for 20 years or so with nothing to eat but cold oatmeal porridge. Then I think Mr. Creed should be stripped naked, sprayed all over with bright blue paint, and made to run round and round Piccadilly Circus until he drops from exhaustion, after which he should be killed by some not-very-humane method. Then the Tate Gallery should be reduced to rubble by aerial bombardment, the rubble carted away to be used as landfill, and the ground sown with salt. Then the fools who pay good money to look at this "art" should be packed into boxcars and tipped off the white cliffs of Dover, and their mangled corpses left to be feasted on by dogs, crows and crabs.
But of course, Derbyshire's no Postmodernist: what he wrote took time and talent.