Editor's Notebook: Dan Rottenberg

In his attack on “The Capital ‘C’ Culture syndrome,” Patrick Hazard argues that the top-down notion of uplifting the masses by inundating them with museums and such is the wrong approach: “You build a decent society of fairness and accessibility and the Culture follows,” Hazard contends.

Hmm. Didn’t some guys in Eastern Europe recently spend about a half-century experimenting with such a strategy? And didn’t they, in the name of fairness and decency, inadvertently create the most boring and repressive cultures in the history of the planet?

(This exchange was originally on the luminous and literate site, Broad Street Review, where art and ideas meet.)