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Academic culture has chosen to prioritize a smarmy kind of pseudo-morality (to be carefully distinguished from virtue) over habit-breaking, vitality, excellence; pop-culture just generates money that it pumps back into self-advertisement and self-validation. From the academic camp, advocates of aesthetics are complicit with historical injustice; from the pop-culture camp, aesthetic standards are synonymous with pretension. Bizarrely, to care about the cultivation of beautiful, complex, timeless artifacts is to be a ‘pretentious asshole.’ Nietzsche’s observations and predictions about the inversion of values have become almost banally, universally true — inarguably accurate.
