While hoi polloi do not show much interest in high culture, it is not undemocratic to promote it at the public expense.

Think, wrote the cultural critic Eunice Lipton, "about Michelangelo, van Gogh, Rodin, Picasso, Pollock. Could these artists be lesbians, Asian Americans, Native Americans?" Her point was that if they had been any of these things, they would not have been recognised as "artist-geniuses" (her term); and this by implication shows that the notion of high culture in the western tradition embodies everything that is exclusive of other cultures and elitist within its own.

Cold Culture