Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank – or to blame.

Kitsch is a sentimentalization of reality in response to cultural failure. The greater the failure, the more malignant the sentimentalization.

Civilization is an achievement not a gift; it is always besieged, must constantly be defended, and once lost, is immeasurably difficult to reclaim. We see the results of the assaults against freedom all around us.

Although aesthetically nugatory, “Beat Culture and the New America” was an exhibition of considerable significance – but not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended, Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologist’s report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history.

It is often said that great works of art are “inexhaustible” – capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of “endless interpretation. But Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, demonstrates in painful if inadvertently hilarious detail that this does not mean that works of art are immune from – that they are not in fact often subject to – wild and perverse misinterpretation.

Ginsberg turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, ‘We’ll get you through your children!’ For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true.

Our complexity is much more likely to lead us astray than any simplicity we may follow.

We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years.

What the historian Elie Kedourie called “the Chatham House Version” – that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization – everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.

Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.