The other day I was talking with a colleague about the merits of the latest Batman film. Or rather, he was talking to me of those merits, for he, as the Batman posters with which he had decorated the walls of our office in the Faculty of Creative Arts and the nature of his research into the Superhero comics of World War II suggested, had a great deal more knowledge about and interest in and enthusiasm for the subject than I did. Also I was at a disadvantage in not having seen the film. Gazing at the wayfaring tree on the lawn outside our window, I continued a little half-heartedly to hold up my end of the conversation until, fed up at last with my wry and uncertain responses, he closed the subject with the most stinging remark he could think of: i.e. that it wasn’t worth discussing the matter with someone whose artistic tastes were so inflexibly conservative.

I opened my mouth in order to make, if possible, some articulate, witty rejoinder - and then I paused. I looked back at my colleague. So fiercely was he staring at his computer screen that he might have been an actor in a film himself, not one of the Batman movies, but rather the sort of thriller that features a scene in which someone’s ‘real time location’ is being tracked down by an agent in an office like ours, only bigger and with more computers and more agents sitting at them and without the damp patch on the ceiling. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see what he was reading - some JSTOR essay or leftist blog, perhaps - but whatever it was, it was clearly absorbing him wholly. Besides, his words expressed not just his own subjective views on art but also those of the present-day orthodoxy, and to have taken further issue with them at this point would have required more effort on my part than I cared to make, and much, much more Socratic unconditioned thoughtfulness on his than seemed to be on offer. So, I did not go on.

Yet if I had gone on, I might have said something like this. In the first place, I do not think of my tastes as conservative. Nor do I think of them as political or apolitical, retrograde or futuristic, hidebound or avant-garde. What I look for in works of art is the sublime. What I look for is something ideal, something that affords the prospect of transcendence. In art, as in culture in general, I desire - indeed I long for - that which elevates, which nourishes, which expresses truth and love, which brings sublimity and offers bliss.