A Moral Education

Here's a way of putting the problem: on one hand we want art to be free, and on the other we want it to mean. Not just to mean, but to be meaningful—to be useful for, and so maybe responsible to, other realms of life: our sense of community, say, or politics, our moral relations. As often happens when competing positions have claims to truth, the pendulum of consensus swings between them, and the pendulum has swung quite far, in recent years, toward the pole of responsibility and holding art to account.