What the patrons of the bad art clearly desire—and get—is a pleasant background to life, a something that will fill up odd moments, ‘packing’ for the mental trunk or ‘roughage’ for the mental stomach. There is really no question of joy: of an experience with a razor’s edge which re-makes the whole mind, which produces ‘the holy spectral shiver’, which can make a man (as the ‘wind musique’ made Pepys) feel ‘really sick—just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife’. The pleasure in bad art is not an occurrence, in unfortunate context, of the same pleasure men take in good art. The
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