A few months ago I confessed to my best friend that I liked reading about modern art more than looking at it. Baudelaire, Kandinsky, and Rilke have an honored place on my bookshelf: they had interesting things to say and contributed to a revolution in consciousness. However, I prefer to look at traditional figurative art. I’m not sure whether this makes me a shallow philistine or a free spirit who broke the chains of art pundit indoctrination.

Today I read a reactionary article by Art Renewal Center founder Fred Ross that re-ignited my questions about art and taste. Ross is the self-proclaimed leader of the charge against the pressure to glorify the moderns.

While I don’t agree with Ross’s list of musical or literary masterworks, I do share his instincts when it comes to painting. However, while Ross and the ARC are unabashedly Eurocentric, my museum of choice is the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Still, it’s hard to tell whether my adoration of bodhisattvas and celadonware is a different flavor of art snobbery or a primitive instinct to return to idolatry. I’m the first to angst over the tyranny of beauty, yet I stare at White Tara until I fall into a trance.

While there are certainly more important things to worry about, it’s worth thinking about the human outlook on art because that communicates something about the state of our soul. While Ross is trying to swap one rankism for another, I think the underlying issue is not so much what we choose to contemplate as how to disentangle love of contemplation from claims to rank.