Samuel W. Kho

“Good, true and beautiful.” Everyone knows, or is supposed to know what this means. But what if the label is just hollow at best, or misleading at worst?

I recently ran a discussion on aesthetics that was highly personal, evocatively objective and maybe aggravatingly debatable.

Three days before Barack Obama became the first African-American to be elected as U.S. President, I was doing more than watching the news from sidelines and judging politics from a distance. That night, even as one of the artists sang his songs and the puppet show began (yes, there was a puppet show!), the twenty-or-so people in the room were transfixed, at least for a moment, transported to perhaps a more humane sense of polity. I thought I saw that transport in their eyes.

In my yet-to-read list is Confessions of an Art Addict, a memoir of the legendary heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim. That's right, of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao in Spain. What follows, here, is a confessional, but with none of the glamour or...