Furthermore, the idea of intrinsic value was by no means limited to "high culture." Guys tried to impress their dates by taking them to jazz clubs instead of going to hear a Bee Gees cover band. Rock fans who aimed at sophistication sought out more ambitious "underground" music and were quick to display their highly developed tastes to their friends. Liking the most popular or accessible group was often seen as a sign of superficiality. Generally people felt that if they got nothing out of "difficult" art or literature, the problem was likely their own. After enough time, some and perhaps even many people made it over the hurdles and came to love it, whether "it" was John Donne or Richard Wagner or John Coltrane.

On the other hand, what happens if there are no intrinsic values, or if people act as if there were none? Then it's a waste of time to grapple with much of anything. People will need to have a wide menu of choices. If something doesn't satisfy them, they'll flick to another channel, and if there's nothing good on any channel, the search itself becomes the program. The father of the current U.S. president was known to prefer the Beach Boys to the Philharmonic and saw no need to pretend a love for high culture: If he didn't like broccoli, he just wouldn't eat it.

The lesson that has been taken from Cage and Duchamp is that if traffic noise and toilet seats are equal to Mozart and Rembrandt then so are Garth Brooks and black-velvet Elvis paintings. This view quickly leads to taste being the only legitimate arbiter. In the cultural realm this rapidly leads to the downward homogenization of taste toward the least common denominator, a phenomenon that makes almost everyone vaguely uncomfortable.

But even in a techno-utopian future where content on demand lets each person's taste be perfectly satisfied -- those who like Schoenberg and those who like Billy Ray Cyrus -- there may not be any place left for art. Art is not about giving people what they want. It's about giving them something they don't know they want. It's about submitting to someone else's vision. This is hardly ever discussed these days.

The lesson I take from Cage and Duchamp is not that all art is equal, but that all art demands that we surrender our vision to the artist's. Duchamp dares us to see the beauty he found in the toilet seat. Cage tries to force us to turn the same ears to traffic noise as we would lend to Mozart. They both know that art is a team effort between artist and audience and that the latter half of that pair needs help in understanding the importance and nature of its role. This is not to say that either Cage or Duchamp is a great artist, necessarily, but that they both understood how difficult it is to engage with art.

Some of us, even in this day and age, may have waded through "Finnegans Wake" or "Remembrance of Things Past," but how many would go through works of that difficulty if we suspected that in all likelihood they were just complex crap (as is inevitably the case with new art)?

That's what I said: Most art is crap. This may be a shocking idea to many people. We think of art as the great masterworks we know, and it's very easy to forget the mountains of mediocrity that were sifted to lift Bach or Dante or Emily Dickinson to their Olympian heights. I have heard people suggest that somehow the gene pool has been diluted to the point that no more Beethovens are possible (this suggestion actually came from a composer). What they forget is that Gioacchino Rossini was arguably more famous than Beethoven in the early 19th century and that a French opera composer named Giacomo Meyerbeer was much more popular than his rival, Richard Wagner.

In almost any era, the sheer mass of bad or mediocre work tends to dwarf the good or great works. This can lead us to assume that the past was somehow better, since we kept only the best parts and threw out the crap. I would venture to say that there have probably been more masterpieces created during the past 20 years than there were in the last 20 years of the 19th century (an easy bet, since the population is so much bigger now). We just haven't finished sorting the gems from the garbage yet.

Imagine having to go through a collection of the10 million paintings -- probably a low estimate -- done last year by everyone from famous artists to unknown talents to my grandmother (who recently started painting as a retirement hobby). Even if you knew there was a new Picasso in there somewhere, which of course you wouldn't, how would you keep your eyes fresh enough to see it? And once you stopped believing that there was anything all that special to be found, why would you bother?

If no one is willing make this effort, most great new works will never be found at all. Difficult works, like those of Joyce or Proust (or Schoenberg or Messiaen) will become all but impossible to discover, and perhaps also to produce as well.

This was why culture became an undemocratic realm in the first place, and why attempts to democratize it may bear unwanted side effects. To find great art, we need people who are able and willing to go through those 10 million paintings on the off-chance of finding one masterpiece. This screening process means that when you or I decide to spend time on art we can reduce our choices to works that have already been evaluated and recommended. Someone -- presumably someone who has demonstrated knowing more about these things than we do -- thinks they are worth spending time on.

I'm not saying the system was ever perfect. Individual people will always try to advance their friends and punish their enemies. But the pressure not to be left out of an important trend, and the desire to find the next big thing, forced some degree of integrity and openness in even the most corrupt of art administrators. Ultimately, it was in their interest to promote as "great" things that truly were great.

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