The Ultra-Rich and High Culture

The novelist and critic Ryan Ruby has argued that,”what is historically unique about today's ultra-rich, as a class, is that they show no interest in high culture, least of all literature. things have gotten so bad that taste is no longer required to legitimate wealth or to distinguish the ultra-rich from potential competitors.”* This explains far more convincingly than the conspiracy theories on the right - the kidnapping of culture by woke and Critical Race Theory. and all that - or than the triumphalism of the cultural bureaucrats of the new cultural dispensation who believe themselves to have wrested the commanding heights of the culture from the old elite and at last are opening it up to the excluded and the marginalized.