The impassioned disputations on taste and aesthetics at the now-maligned Salons were disputations on ethics, morals, and politics. As in our art world, taste was an advocacy vehicle for the Good, if hardly for the same Good.

Chest forward, he strides on stage with an Elvis-inflected, hip-swaying, rolling cowboy-amble, wearing a severe expression beneath his blue face paint.

For anyone convinced that capitalism has eroded all valid forms of mental or perceptual resistance available in art, Jennifer Ponce de León’s Another Aesthetics is Possible will serve as testimony that this conclusion is not only premature but fundamentally wrong.