The argument that art is just another object in one's regular experience. The new museology says, Listen, don't hold this object up in any higher esteem than anything else -- which makes it easier to make art objects part of everyday debates.

It demystifies the object, which can help you see it more directly. But it can also make you wonder why you're bothering to look at it at all.

Is it so bad to be ever so slightly intimidated as you approach a wonderful Botticelli at the National Gallery? And to be quiet, and to look at it carefully and really take it in?

When you were thinking about pursuing grad studies in art history, you couldn't find what you were looking for. What was missing? And what did you finally learn has happened?

Art history graduate programs used to be centered on helping students actively engage art objects and understand them, and to cultivate a level of fluency in approaching and understanding art objects. Art history is more focused now on theorizing. Many students, especially at Harvard, spend years studying art history without really being forced into an encounter with art objects. I'm afraid of the effects this is going to have on museums. Harvard, particularly, is a place that trained decades and decades of wonderful museum directors.

Is Harvard especially bad?

It's one of the worst. But any program that used to have connoisseurship as a hallmark of its curriculum is either fully gone or considerably on the wane. When you trade away important values that have guided artistic creation and scholarship for centuries, you trade away your ability to pass any reasonable judgment on the quality of things, and to trust scholars and scholarship. It cedes to politics. It cedes to power, really, to use a word that's particularly treasured by the left. For example: If you no longer teach connoisseurship in school, who fills the void? Galleries. Dealers.

So the administrators are taking over, and the emphasis on social critique is getting greater. How are these facts related?

To a certain extent, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, what art should be came to be redefined as: Art needs to have a social message; artists need to be social advocates; artists need to be using their work as a vehicle for something else. It became a very lucrative track for many artists to pursue, and it came to overshadow many other ways of working.

How much blame does the NEA deserve for the current state of the arts?

A lot of people blame the NEA for a lot of things, because it has lent credibility to trends that don't deserve to have it. I don't think the NEA is at the heart of the problem. But I do think it epitomizes the problem.

The "art wars" that you refer to seem to replay the same argument over and over. What is it?

We have one side that lines up along the battle line of censorship and the other side that lines up along the battle line of blasphemy. And they face each other and blast away. The rest of us get bored silly, learn nothing and get confused about what the state of things really is. The artists who provoke the battles become famous, and the people who participate in the battles send out a lot of direct mail and start new organizations.

I suspect that most lefties are convinced that the real reason for conservative attacks on outfits like the NEA is that conservatives just don't like culture, and never have. Do conservatives in fact care about art?

I don't really like talking about the arts in these terms. To me the arts are apolitical. I don't think that someone with conservative eyes would see art any differently than anyone else. The arts deserve to be depoliticized. That's the wonderful thing about the arts that so many people are trying to rob them of. The arts really do float above those kinds of debates.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"