When I read the posts, it strikes me that many of the disagreements could have been resolved like mist in the morning sun, if the people involved had been able to agree on what they meant by the terms they used.

This conceptual confusion was monumental, and I could give many examples of it, but I prefer to avoid the pitiful battlefields of the art debate, I diffidently confine myself to some short and hopefully unassailable objections.

There is a group of artists in the Nordic countries who want to restore the status of traditional figurative painting, the so-called Retro Guards. The goal is not to crowd out other art movements but to create a situation where different genres can exist side-by-side. So it is today in music, where jazz, opera, pop and everything else can live in peaceful coexistence. It is inconceivable that one critic would condemn an opera based on jazz music's assessment criteria.

The Retro Guards do not clai...