I remember going to a modern art show in DC years ago. Something thematic, probably a bit political. All of these fascinating shapes on the walls, the floor, hanging from the ceiling - one into which you could crawl; something you could touch or stroke. One whole room arrayed with thousands of identical toy-sized somethings. A new surprise around every corner.

And then I started to read the white paper rectangles, with the artists' names and the titles of the works. I had nothing against the artists, nothing I knew, so that part was fine.

But the titles - what these things were. The "ideas." They were just so...stupid, labored, trite and they blighted the previously wonderful objects with that triteness. Except the little toy shapes, each of which represented a Warsaw pact tank and the total was supposedly in line with the latest Western military estimates. I think it was meant to mock the seriousness of the threat by reducing all those huge clanky high explose hurling behemoths to tiny nothings, but my companion looked at the installation and said what I thought: "Jeez, the Russians sure have a shitload of tanks."

Visual artists are, for the most part, shallow, parroting thinkers and their virtues lie elsewhere. Ye novelists and poets,how do you think it is with you?

The observations, the insights, the suspended irony and all that - yes, great fun, occasionally enlightening, thought provoking. But what if you were judged by what your stuff is about, as I was forced to do about all that well-intentioned art by those excruciatingly well-intentioned titles? What you're tryin a say? I mean, think about those Russian greats, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (even before he repudiated his great work as, in my interpretation of "What is Art" as insufficiently stupid) - have to twist them a fair way around (or be a remarkably interesting anachronistic lunatic) to assent to what they was tryin a say. At least the positive aspects of their message - the great thing about ripping something is not only is the vocabulary of condemnation WAY more extensive than praise, but the law of averages and the Fall of Man, you're going to be right most of the time. Somehow I don't think, oh, Christian Slavophilism makes anybody's list anymore. Oh, Alexander S is still around?

Not too many novelists as sensible as Jane Austin, who simply says in several narrow but sharp ways: "Put up your hands. Back away from the Stupid Button of Self-Immolation. Slowly." Because I don't think she even bothers to talk to the real life analogues of selfish shits that also propel her plots.