Art is flirtation.

It invites us to while our moments enjoying. Art may argue that it’s healthful – morally therapeutic – but any benefit art asserts is secondary to enjoyment. Beauty is not practically useful. Didactic art seldom satisfies either head or heart.

Any flirtation presupposes its target. Whom are we enticing? Even the most hospitable host doesn’t welcome all comers. Level of difficulty guards the door to acquaintance. We are what we are drawn to. Is your taste promiscuous and forgiving or picky and discriminating? Do you seek an art that’s elegant and refined or raw and rambunctious? Are you OK with polysyllables? Palpitated by porn?

Avant-garde artists from the turn of the twentieth century ratcheted the difficulty of their productions. Proust, Joyce and T.S. Eliot required more of readers than Dickens, George Eliot and Browning. Highbrows sought to exclude casual consumers. This happened in all the fine arts. Debussy and Stravinsky are harder going than Brahms or Mahler, Monet and Picasso more perplexing than their predecessors. High and popular art came to despise each other. Art-lovers had to pledge allegiance: you couldn’t keep “a foot in both camps.”

Both high and popular art suffered from this divorce, in my view. High art tended impossibly toward disdain for workaday stiffs. Have you ever tried to read Finnegans Wake? Only acolytes can, devoting themselves to its cabalistic complications, slamming the door against the irreverent mob. I feel this way about much twentieth century concert music, which I’d love to love. Many of the -isms in the visual arts – cubism, fauvism, futurism, vorticism, expressionism, conceptualism, et al. – make me dismal with yearning for the pleasant. Too often with moderns I find myself puzzling why I should admire their affronts.

My attitude toward art is Goldilocks’: neither too hard nor too easy but just right. I abominate flaccid or negligent prose, for example, as I might a floozy. But if I can’t decode a supposed modernist masterpiece, these days I fault the maker, not myself. I suppose I could learn to read Finnegans Wake, if I set my heart to it, but the time and effort would keep me from more amiable – and profound – productions. When it comes to choosing between Bach and, say, Pierre Boulez, or Caravaggio and Rothko, for me it’s a no-brainer. I may detect excellences in contemporaries, but they don’t – to put it crudely – float my boat.

I write to flatter my readers and rebuff riffraff. That I deem our outings “art” is not a value judgment but an acknowledgement of their uselessness. I want to make prose as taut and sinewy as my masters’ (Montaigne, Dr. Johnson, Thoreau, and the gang), but not too gristly to devour or digest. I seek the society of amiable small-d democrats who rejoice in laughter, love, mercy, grace and truth. The quality of my readers matters more to me than their quantity. I could only write a bestseller by mistake (a mistake I’d be pleased to make!).

Am I an elitist? I suppose. I do not believe “I’m OK and you’re OK,” but we’re all works in progress who should strive to improve. The mendacity and mediocrity of humanity dishearten me, as I may have mentioned. Smug self-satisfaction sickens me. My best is a sorry fraction of what it might have been. Good enough is not good.

Like anyone, I like folks who are like me. I wink and sashay to inveigle the like-minded into our cozy coterie. The so-called real world may be rough, raucous, rude, but not here. Here, with any luck, grace, consideration, aspiration, sweetness and light prevail.