NOTE: Thanks to the first commentator for the title correction. My high school Latin teacher, Miss Kibby, would kill me.

A National Endowment for the Arts survey on American arts habits, released yesterday, reveals what we already know -- namely, that more and more American adults have stopped going to museums, movies, concerts, opera, dance performances, and the like. The number of Americans going out of their homes for the purpose of seeing or listening to art (of any kind) has sunk to a record low since the NEA first started tracking these things in 1982. At the same time, more and more Americans are making art (of some kind) on their own.

Reading literature was the only arts-related activity to show an increase since the previous survey (perhaps due to the rise in online reading). Yet reading for mere pleasure, as opposed to reading for school or work, decreased. For those...

New York isn’t Calcutta, and begging isn’t all that common here. Even so, because I ride the subway almost every day, I come face-to-face with beggars all the time. Some subway beggars are regulars—like the scruffy guy who makes his plea on the early morning uptown A-train, or the legless man (who looked for sure as if he’d done military service) who used to work the No. 1 train. Wearing an old cowboy hat, he used his muscular arms to push himself along. His stumpy thighs, balanced on top of an old skateboard, and his beggar’s cup clutched between his pursed lips, made even the most pitiless passengers pull out a quarter. Like a lot of regulars, he simply vanished one day. Gone, like that.

Beggars like to step into a subway car like heralds bearing an important proclamation. Usually, it goes something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m homeless and I’m...

In an e-mail message sent out to the Hofstra University community earlier today, our president, Stuart Rabinowitz, announced the end of Hofstra’s intercollegiate football program. We were a Football Championship Subdivision school, not a Bowl Subdivision school, and football was not a money maker for us. Still, this can’t have been an easy decision. A lot of people (players, coaching staff, and fans at all levels) invest all sorts of emotions in college and university football teams -- most of the time, more so than in other sports -- and many of them are very upset right now. We’ve now joined Northeastern, also a Football Championship Subdivision school that (just last month) chose to end its football program.

The president’s decision, which had the full support of the board, came after a two-year review of the sports programs at Hofstra. Shutting down football affects no other sports...

Nothing could be more appropriate, and celebratory, than the recent acquisition by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. of Byron Kim’s “Synecdoche.” The work consists of a grid of 8-inch by 10-inch panels (still growing in overall size, as the artist’s project is ongoing), each painted to match the skin color and tone of various people, some famous, some not, whom Mr. Kim had sit for him.

A huge “high modernist grid” with a conceptual bent? Ordinarily this would make my Venetian blinds come down. But this is not the case here. I first saw “Synecdoche” at the 1993 Whitney Biennial. At the time, I thought it both gorgeous and deeply suggestive in its multiple readings -- a knockout work of art in an otherwise tedious and didactic exhibition that was, even at the time, dubbed aggressively politically correct.

Seeing the variety of beiges, browns, slight pinks and palish yellows...

Thanksgiving is one of the few American holidays that hasn't been destroyed by consumerism. Sure, there’s a Macy’s Day parade and a slew of football games on television. But how many turkeys can you eat? How many potatoes can you mash? How many paper Pilgrims can you stick on your window? There’s only so much of it that can be bought and sold in the marketplace.

Some people bend the holiday to make it very religious. Others merely give special thanks for their blessings. Some do a politico-religious turn on the holiday, using it as an occasion to be especially thankful for their freedom to practice their religion. But Thanksgiving cannot be distorted into a religion, and no single religion owns it. Whatever it’s history, it’s now a secular holiday where families and friends gather together and pig out.

When I was growing up, the history of Thanksgiving was an enormous part of the...

Humans are first and foremost attracted to the patterns we see in life because of their beauty. Only afterwards do we discover their utility. What supreme irony, then, lies in what inevitably happens next: The more we use the patterns we discover, the more we lose our awareness of the beauty that attracted us to them in the first place.

The Trixie Telemetry company is a case in point. I’d never heard of the thing until this morning, when I was drinking my morning coffee and read about it in an online article in The New York Times. In “Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?” we learn that the Trixie Telemetry company sells a program to help parents raise their babies by quantifying their little lives, and turning what they do into data. Parents use the program to keep track of the distance between productions in the diaper or the length of naps, or the amount and kind of food intake, or what...

Some women love pornography, but I'm not one of them. Porn's nature seems to me to satisfy men's needs, and not the needs of women. (Admittedly, this deserves its own discussion, which isn't going to happen here.) I’ve already owned up publicly, in previous posts, to being a prude and proud of it, so for those who might be offended by people who don't love porn, I suggest you not read what follows.

Whenever I see porn -- which isn’t very often, mind you, unless I happen to, pardon the expression, bump into it, it strikes me as ridiculous. I respond this way whether I encounter the high-art porn of Robert Mapplethorpe, his face turned around to leer slyly at the viewer, all the while with a bullwhip up his butt, or the low art porn of bored actors grinding methodically away on the Robin Byrd Show. Porn is a feeble, worn-out form of sex. Porn actors always seem to be acting, and their...

Decades ago, the sculptor Carl Andre remarked that Andy Warhol, King of Pop Art, was “the perfect glass and mirror of his age and certainly the artist we deserved.” With Warhol’s iconic painting 200 One Dollar Bills selling for $43.7 -illion at last night’s Sotheby auction, not a thing has changed: Warhol remains our perfect glass and mirror and continues to be the artist we deserve. The painting, which sold to some anonymous rich collector or other, is one of Warhol’s first silkscreen paintings consisting of a grid of 200 of our almighty greenbacks, arranged in an oh-so-perfect modernist grid.

Warhol’s art, simultaneously a critique and a celebration of consumer society, brought the attitudes and accoutrements of modern mass culture out onto the front and center stage of the fine arts. With utter, blank flatness, the artist accepted the deadening sameness in the stupidity, vulgarity,...

In an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, Blake Gopnik reports that revisionist thinking in art history is that all those nudes in Western art are actually about sex. Stupid me. Here I was, bopping along, thinking they were about rutabagas.

For example, take Titian’s reclining Venus d’Urbino -- a lovely, buck-naked lady whose eyes gaze straight out at us while her hand perches tantalizingly on top of her crotch. For years, art historians have held forth on why that picture is Art with a capital “A,” and not Sex with a capital “S.” Erotic, yes, but overtly sexual? No. And art history students, eager to pass their art history exams, have obligingly written reams of essays parroting their professors’ explanation of art as sublimation and the nude as the ideal form and all that other sort of poppycock.

Art historians such as the British scholar Charles Hope and the Columbia art...

Who are all these Americans who so love their health insurance that they’ll go to Washington to demonstrate against a government plan to offer health insurance to those who don’t have any health insurance? You know, the ones who utter such sentences as, “I love my health insurance plan,” and “Get the government bureaucrats off my back.” People who “love” their health insurance plans? How is that? Because it’s “freedom of choice,” they say. I have a name for people who dig in their “live-free-or-die” heels in order to prevent a government “takeover” of health care: the “I’ve got mine” crowd.

The news last evening reported that the “I’ve got mine” crowd cheered Representative Michelle Bachman and House GOP leader John Boehner. Boehner stood at a podium saying he would do whatever was necessary to prevent “tens of thousands” of government bureaucrats from taking over health care. Whoa,...