Over the years I have noticed that there is an unimaginative approach to how conservatives engage questions of aesthetics. This pattern is neither surprising nor unexpected on the one hand but, on the other hand, what is surprising is the extent to which self-identified defenders of what has by now come to be called traditional aesthetics seem to do two things: 1) write and act as though the very idea of aesthetics is a "timeless" or "eternal" thing that didn't evolve during the eighteenth century in Western Europe and 2) mount defenses of the viability of what amounts to a Romanticist aesthetic that skips earlier views within the West or ignores alternative intra-Western views and settles in for bromides predicated on defining buzzwords, shibboleths attributed to their ideological adversaries real and imagined.
Rather than write an all-too conventional conservative screed that sticks with abstractions while naming criminals and charlatans like Cage or Duchamp I want to stick with a couple of writers whose work demonstrates how readily would-be defenders of The Great Tradition can't resist the buzzword definition as serious and competent thought gambit. For the purposes of today's writing we'll look at Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative and, of course, John Borstlap, at his blog.
