I started this and was quickly faced with the thrilling possibility that I might have come across a philosophy text that was actually entertaining! Leo ranting about art genuinely had me interested. But it was a BLIND. For very soon he started lulling me to sleep with what philosophers thought about aesthetics and that was painful (when even your publisher is tell readers to skip chapters, Leo, be certain you have hit Dullsville and back away, please).

I came back to life when he started ranting again, but still couldn't take him seriously, because this book is based entirely around reverse-snobbery. If any elite likes any art, that art must be Wrong. Only peasants are the true arbiters of taste, and if they can't understand a specific instance of art (or science) then it's totally irrelevant to the human condition. (Yes, science too. The final chapter was a digression on how the horror of scientists studying things that interested them, and the experimentalists in general, were messing things up for the lowest common denominator by, you know, being intellectually curious.)

And that's not even getting into the whole bizarre religious argument behind this, which I think went as follows: "My religion is the right one. It prioritises brotherhood and general equality. Therefore if there is some piece of art that someone does not understand, that art is divisive, inegalitarian, and anti-religious, because Jesus hates The Ring Cycle and I do too."

I'm sure there's subtleties I'm missing here, but that seemed about the size of it. I might have side-eyed a lot of this text, but I wasn't crushingly bored for all of it, so two stars it is.

Stick to lit, Leo.