Amusing set pieces but I felt only marginal sympathy for the young art student's reflections. I don't think one ought to go to school with some sort of underlying expectation that an institution (educational or otherwise) will spoon-feed you a meaningful life. I am, however, from a different generation and "youth culture" has never occupied a big part of my life. I'm 43; my natural-born interests are -- so they say -- highbrow. I studied philosophy and comparative literature at Princeton and Yale. My studies -- by proclivity and not spoon-feeding -- concerned the possibility of poetry and critical thinking after the Holocaust. My working life involved social justice work -- various forms of advocacy, theater and organizing with homeless HIV+ and/or mentally ill homeless people in NYC. I came to art late and it occupies a deeply emotional, almost spiritual, and in many ways non-verbal place in my life.

I am grateful, however, for the introduction to UBUWEB; this is a great resource. I don't happen to agree with the apparent assumption by the UBU editorial staff that the sole purpose of art is to mount a successful critique of popular culture despite the evident problem that "irony, satire, and subversion have been enshrined by advertising and the popular imagination." It may be one purpose for some. For me, though, Stella Adler's remark is more where it's at: "When life beats down and crushes the soul, art reminds you that you have one." And that sort of reminder may be the antidote to the vapidity of "youth culture" and its collusion with capitalism.