I've been looking high and low for great art in my adopted city, Washington, DC. Notwithstanding the Smithsonian's fabulous collections I have seen little in Washington's galleries and theaters that is new, exciting, or provocative. New York has a monopoly on all that. But there is art here. Indeed, there is art so great that it reveals the high art of the New York scene for what it really is: narcissistic and irrelevant child's play for the decadent and self-absorbed. The art that goes on in Washington, DC, the art that this city produces countless times every single day, is an art of power. More specifically, it is a representation and affirmation of American hegemony. In function it is akin to monumental government architecture everywhere, or to David's tableaux of the Revolution and Napoleon, or, better still, the court ritual of Louis XIV. Yet in form it is distinctly modern and eminently American. It is the government press conference.

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