Banksy, the British street painter about whom Dalrymple wrote at some length in the New Criterion back in the Spring, has spent the last few weeks in New York, and Dalrymple has a short piece in City Journal about the public reaction:

The enormous interest his work arouses, disproportionate to its artistic merit, shows not that there is fashion in art, but that an adolescent sensibility is firmly entrenched in our culture. The New York Times reports that a lawyer, Ilyssa Fuchs, rushed from her desk the moment she heard about Banksy’s latest work and ran more than half a mile to see it. Would she have done so if a delicate fresco by Piero della Francesca had been discovered in Grand Central Terminal?