Desire and Fate

Life imitates dreck. No one today, not even the stubbornest of aesthetes (if there are even a few of them left, hiding out in a gazebo somewhere in Tuscany), could say with the Wilde of “The Decay of Lying” that, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.”* But this has more to do with self-lobotomizing of the arts as it does on the decline of …