Beginning of article  Few things tell us more about a culture -
what it esteems, what it disparages - than its art. The plays of
Sophocles distill an essence of Periclean Athens just as the
paintings of Titian bring us near to the heart of seventeenth-
century Venetian culture. Closer to our own day, it is easy to
see how Modernist art - with its dissonances and anxious
novelties - epitomizes the giddy, Promethean ferment of the
early twentieth century. Le Sacre du Printemps or The Wasteland
could no more have been composed in 1850 than Les Demoiselles
D'Avignon could have been painted then. Such works belong to and
help define their time.  What, then, of contemporary culture?
What does the art of the past few decades tell us about it - and
about ourselves? Alas, anyone interested in understanding what
is at stake in the "culture wars" - those many battles about
values that, since the 1960s, have loomed increasingly large in
American society - must ponder contemporary art. I say "alas"
because the spectacle th