Spectator: Are Beavis and Butt-head Arty?

Today everyone fromShandling to Schwarzenegger is a postmodernist

When haven't the dons and high-culture fogies complained that culture is in decline? The pronouncement is always delivered with a mixture of fretfulness and self-congratulation: Americans aren't interested in Shakespeare, won't listen to Stravinsky -- and it's because of television, Hollywood, all the meretricious easy-access audiovisual crud. In fact, a strain of cerebral artiness is suddenly proliferating in the mainstream, a funny autodeconstruction that in the past decade has moved from European literature (Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler), to West End theater (Michael Frayn's Noises Off), to quality American pop: it is at the core of The...

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