Jumping into a good conversation about Damien Hirst.

I'm going to aim at renarrating the dispute between Helen and Freddie on the subject of Damien Hirst, the man who put that poor shark in a tank of formaldehyde, and then got the tank into the contemporary art wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Helen has already responded once; we'll see where it goes from here.

If I'm reading Helen's article correctly, the line that explains her approach is “[e]dgy bobos admit — and real bohemians insist — that art can be both immoral and ugly, as long as it's interesting.” But art doesn't get in a museum at all unless someone out there thinks that it's interesting. The key question is: interesting to whom? And in what way?

One thing about interest—shall we say desire? appeal?—is that, although it is subjective, it's also interpersonal. We're always trying to convince each other that something is interesting or uninteresting. And while it usually works better in the first direction, there have been times that I thought something was absolutely fascinating until someone pointed out to me that it was a bad copy of something better. (Case in point: me, middle school, Christian rock music.)

I mean, I thought the shark tank was interesting on several levels. For one thing, it was big, and you I walked around it, and saw how the light bent through the liquid. The shark itself still had that creepy dead-eye shark-stare. If the tank were just in some natural history museum, I'd find it interesting in the same way. But then there was the next level, which was: “Why is this thing sitting here in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?” On this level, it was interesting in the same way that a well-dressed man on the sidewalk shouting nonsense phrases at the top of his lungs would be interesting, with the difference that the man on the sidewalk interrupts my day, but I walk through the Met to have my day interrupted.

But to live in a world where people found men shouting nonsense consistently more interesting than good conversations, or sermons, or philosophical lectures: that would be strange.

This is where Freddie's historical narrative comes in. The “crisis of representation” that we all know from our “boilerplate undergrad art history” courses really happened. If I may keep extending my metaphor, we miscommunicated so badly with ourselves that we began to suspect that conversation itself was nonsense. And we wanted something that could escape nonsense: authenticity. So the fact of a dead shark in a tank in the museum is partially explained by the story of this crisis, which is in many ways an interesting story. We are all trying to figure out where we go from here.

Helen is basically saying that the “reductive mania for honest communication” is a little bit played out at this point, and she would like to see something else. But she's making a traditionalist argument, which, in this case, is not the same as a strictly conservative argument.

“Art has never really stopped being in crisis,” says Freddie. The conservative wants to end the crisis by going back to some ideal past when men were men and painters could paint some real purty horses: to keep talking about the things we were talking about before we got into this mess. The traditionalist, on the other hand, just wants a good conversation. The traditionalist says: “You can keep talking nonsense, and about nonsense, if you want, but some of us would like to talk about something else.”

Insofar as contemporary art represents what we might playfully call the tradition of no more traditions—and let's go ahead and admit that it would be wrong to claim that all of it does—it's like a group of people who just can't stop talking about something. And insofar as I am a member of a group or two that was not completely embroiled in the crisis of representation, I might be legitimately interested in other things: religious art, for instance.

It seems that Freddie's ultimate problem with art traditionalism is that it “privileges just one damned thing after another.” Well, yes, of course, but so does any good conversation.