From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the painter James McNeill Whistler shouted out fiercely into posterity, over the heads of the art-world philistines of his day, and our own:

Listen! There never was an artistic period. There never was an Art-loving nation.

This hoarse cry from the Belle Époque is as bracing as it ever was, especially here in our own burned-out landscape where Art as Whistler defined it—Art with a capital…