“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...