The fake intellectual invites you to conspire in his own self-deception, to join in creating a fantasy world. He is the teacher of genius, you the brilliant pupil. Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers. The arrival of fake thought and fake scholarship in our universities should not therefore be attributed to any explicit desire to deceive. It has come about through the complicit opening of territory to the propagation of nonsense.

The Great Swindle by Roger Scruton from Aeon Magazine.

I went to art school. I don’t agree with everything in this essay but the section quoted above made me smile.

Tags: Art, Culture, Media