"Few have ever died of bad art, or of bad art criticism. This is why the stakes in politics, philosophy, economics and so forth are simply that much higher. But there's another danger, too. When art is elevated to the status of an autonomous enterprise which can be expected to deliver (rather than reflect) insight, moral guidance and even a species of revelation, it starts to look an awful lot like something else which, poignantly, has diminished in stature in exactly the times and places where art (in this autonomous sense) has grown — which is to say, religious faith. And this, ultimately, is my main objection to the way in which Kimball appears to understand art. The tendency to turn culture into an ersatz religion — complete with its own shibboleths and sacred texts, ritual spaces and priestly hierarchy, its own doctrines of election and salvation, its own tones of sanctimony and self-righteousness — is an inheritance from a particular strand of nineteenth century Liberalism that is deeply embedded in all the Anglophone cultures, but it is for that very reason something that conservatives ought, really, to regard with antipathy.
Ultimately, and perhaps unfairly, Kimball's understanding of art strikes me as fundamentally Liberal, rather than conservative. There ought to be more to cultural conservatism, after all, than defending as eternal truth an understanding of cultural endeavour not much older than our own great grandparents' copies of Culture and Anarchy — let alone an understanding no older than that other great figure who once passed amongst the shady groves of Yale and Bennington:
[Art is] a matter of self-evidence and feeling, and of the inferences of feeling, rather than of intellection or information, and the reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.
As anyone who has ever been moved by a picture can tell you, Clement Greenberg had a point — as well as, needless to say, a degree of engagement in politics, and in life more broadly, that could surprise only his stupidest detractors — but no monopoly on truth.
http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/what-is-conservative-art-criticism-3698
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