This evening, I was watching a local newscast on television that made an interesting observation. It regarded arts and crafts as a single thing. It showed young people busily at work in San Pedro at an old army base creating what I see as crafts only. Many of the objects created were interesting. Some were pseudo-random pieces of garbage. Nothing approached the status of what I consider to be art.

It’s like putting an article in Cosmopolitan or a wood carving of an American Indian at the same level as a poem by Emily Dickinson or a novel by Honoré de Balzac or a painting by Rembrandt.

Mind you, crafts are great for making children and teens busy and keeping them out of trouble. They’re great for adult hobbyists who want to create something with their own hands. But they are not an acceptable substitute for high art.

What is happening throughout America is an unwillingness to engage with high art because it is “difficult.” People seem to be less willing to read James Joyce or study a painting by David Hockney or a poem by John Donne. And the older the art is, the more that people shy away from it.

In my own life, I try to engage with difficult art. Why? Because it is more rewarding. I just finished reading a postmodern novel by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025. In his early book The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), each chapter is a single paragraph. The point of view changes with each chapter, and the work is set in a Hungary around the time of the fall of the Communist regime, during which many writers anticipated mass social disruptions.

Each month, I attempt to read at least one difficult book to keep my hand in the game. Also, I love visiting the Getty Center and allowing myself to be challenged by the art on display. It’s worth all the trouble.