The bad news, meanwhile, is that we have no culture of our own. Oh, we have "painters," yes--just take a trot through the Carpenter Center, or the modernist wing at the Fogg. And we have "writers," absolutely--turn on Oprah's Book Club, she'll introduce you to them. "Musicians," too--that Eminem fellow is pretty popular, right? And we've got plenty of great minds--most of them tenured at Harvard, if you believe the promotional literature.

But somewhere in the wreckage of the two World Wars, and the chilling, post-modern pessimism that came after, great art became hard to come by. That was when people started telling us that "greatness" in art is a subjective business, culturally constructed and so forth, and this neat device let them pretend that (save me your howls of anguish) Toni Morrison deserves a Nobel Prize in literature, or that Jackson Pollock's paint-spattered canvases are 20th century versions of the Mona Lisa, or that Elton John deserves a knighthood.

But I think they--or you, perhaps, dear reader, with the collected works of Thomas Pynchon decorating your shelves and a Piet Mondrian print on the wall--know better. I do not claim that today's artists lack talent or brains or ability; many of them have all three in spades. But nobody, anywhere, seems to know what to with it.

So our architects are paid small fortunes, and in return they throw up Mather House, or the Science Center, or the monstrosity that may take the place of the Harvard Provision Company in a few years.

And our writers play word games and write big, complicated books filled with absurdist characters whose lives are neither interesting nor moving--and pick up Pulitzers and plaudits from other writers who do exactly the same thing.

And our musicians and painters--well, the less said about them, the better.

On the bright side, though, we're living longer than ever. So we'll have plenty of time to figure out what went wrong.