Marcel Proust, famous for his titanic saga In Search of Lost Time, abundantly commented on how literature represents an essential instrument for self-discovery and accessing truth in addition to procuring aesthetic pleasure. He argued the novel could create a “qualitative difference” in how reality is perceived and expressed, transfigured through the labour of creation. The fundamental singularity of a genuine work of art – which necessarily demands real engagement and effort from its audience – leads us to see the world in a new and irreversible light. Gradually revealing the artist’s mind in its full clarity, at the same time the artwork exhibits “new relations between things” (The Guermantes Way, 1920) – that is to say, a new way of seeing the world which, quite literally, cannot be unseen. Thus our present is altered by the future it makes possible. And indeed, the 20th century, at whose threshold Proust himself wrote, was full of convulsions which produced many radical new forms – from atonality and cubism to rock and abstract painting, and a host of other art genres – that reshaped perception itself.

Applied to the bureaucratic mindset animating the “creative industries” of recent decades, the outlook is bleak. In the introduction to his cultural history of our century, David Marx describes a “blank space” where artistic invention once flourished. The 21st century has given us reboots, virality and an omnivore monoculture in which everything is consumed, and yet little is judged. The latest symptoms of this long decline are visible in the fall in museum attendance, the permanent state of bankruptcy for opera houses, the closure of galleries, and so on. Overall, audiences disengage – but the arts institutions still insist that their work is more “relevant” than ever. After all, aren’t they the gatekeepers – sorry, I meant the experts – in the room?

The deeper failures of our current art system lie upstream, particularly in the collapse of art criticism as a serious practice of discernment. Without it, taste atrophies, and the generative chain that once linked one strong work to the next begins to break. The opulent critics “heyday”, illustrated by Vanity Fair under editor Graydon Carter, when writers were paid astronomic sums per stories, may long be gone; yet the subsequent tightening of belts has produced, with exquisite irony, a loosening of standards.

Classical music is a good case in point. It is not merely one lifestyle preference among others; rather, like Proust advocated for the novel, classical music cultivates a distinctive mode of attention and a capacity for wonder that exceeds the mundane. Its value is not reducible to social signalling or therapeutic utility. The same principle holds across the arts: genuine works repay sustained, discriminating attention, precisely because they train judgement. When criticism abdicates this role, when it replaces aesthetic evaluation with ideological litmus tests, it does not merely reflect a change in taste, but the acceleration of the erosion of taste itself.

The infrastructure of this erosion is largely unseen, since the decisive suppressions occur long before any public controversy. In training, craft has yielded to “framework”; in other words, students learn to position their work within approved discourses rather than master materials and traditions. Traditional figurative painting or narrative ambition is often framed as naive or politically suspect rather than approached on its own merit. Funding criteria increasingly precede content, and so applications are shaped by identity checkboxes and anticipated social outcomes rather than the work’s intrinsic qualities. Artists internalise what will pass through peer networks, residencies and gatekeepers. In fine, our art institutions narrow imaginative possibilities. Certain subjects become unthinkable, certain formal risks unviable.

This is not the normal pruning of artistic process, by which I mean the healthy discarding of weak ideas. This is, instead, the systemic punishment of work for reasons entirely extrinsic to its aesthetic merit. Institutional filtering treats identity as a proxy for legitimacy. Pioneers in their fields, such as Martin Speake in jazz or Jenny Lindsay in poetry performance, among many others, find themselves outrageously punished and marginalised when generational transmission should actually be strongest. The key paradox here, of course, is that institutions trumpet inclusivity while replicating mediocrity, rewarding those who “play the right game” and looking suspiciously at those who argue in favour of excellence.

In Blank Space, Marx traces a parallel cultural shift towards cheerful but vain “poptimism” and post-practice ideology. It represents a backlash against the perceived elitism that gatekeepers sought to dismantle (only to supersede or enshrine their position at the top of the food chain) without replacing them with rigorous standards. Instant popularity, which really ought to be one measure of success among others – especially as more and more people get conned by AI-generated art – has now become the ultimate arbiter. In turn, art criticism, which once elevated the daring and sustained the difficult, increasingly performs cheerleading or moral accounting. The discourse around art, be it through exhibitions, catalogues or reviews, has been derailed alongside the work itself. Even worse, when editors and curators disappear or self-censor, Substack and social media may well fill the vacuum, but they rarely replicate the sustained, adversarial attention that once forged canons and refined public taste.

The downstream effects, naturally, compound. Self-censorship at the concept stage means fewer risks are taken, so that ambiguity, irony and symbolic complexity – qualities with which critics once wrestled in order to triage, interpret and convey their power to a wider audience – give way to direct, unambiguous messaging. Experimentation, the slow apprenticeship in materials and, ultimately, the freedom to pursue uncertain ideas all become luxuries afforded only to those insulated from reputational and economic precarity. Bad art begets more bad art, until the possibility of excellence tout court feels quaint.

Audiences, of course, sense the fakery even when they cannot name it, or are prevented from naming it. It is fairly clear to anyone who spends more than a few minutes looking at what is artistically on display why museum fatigue is not such a mysterious thing. It is the natural response to a culture that has stopped believing its own claims about the winners.

Anyone grounded in the Catholic tradition understands beauty as a transcendental, a glimpse of ordered reality that disciplines both mind and heart. In an age of managed relevance and algorithmic taste, the work of serious criticism – attentive, rigorous and free – is by essence an act of cultural stewardship. It is radical insofar as it refuses to let the “blank space” define us and prevent our society from imagining its own future, if I may borrow here from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.

The pockets of resistance against this colossal failure of our artistic institutions remain few and far between, and for that reason deserve to be unashamedly celebrated and supported. In east London, critic Pierre d’Alancaisez leads Verdurin, a project space that deliberately reclaims Proust’s salonnière as its namesake. Far from replicating the bourgeois theatre of status and conformity, Verdurin has become a living counter-model: a serious meeting place for rigorous critique, cultivated taste, intellectual courage and aesthetic excellence. Through thoughtful conversations with leading writers and philosophers, in-depth symposia, courses in aesthetics and the philosophy of history, and a publishing imprint dedicated to pushing conceptual boundaries, it is working to rebuild the very conditions in which genuine cultural renewal can take root. Only by reclaiming the courage to judge on artistic merits can we reopen the possibility that future generations will inherit not sloppy “content” but living traditions capable of moving the soul – and allow ourselves to invent the future, at long last.