I must confess to a certain smugness as the debate regarding the removal of Confederate statuary has taken on an aesthetic perspective. For years, I have endured the tacit, passive-aggressive notion from some newspaper colleagues and even bosses that my job as a cultural writer was not as important as those of the political and municipal writers and even the sports reporters. (Indeed, I lost that job partly because it was considered of lesser significance.)

But the arts – somewhat like religion and the family – are the refuge of the desperate and the inconsolable. Unfortunately for the arts, they are a refuge that their seekers often do not fully understand.

Some of my colleagues in my present job as an editor wonder about the artistic value that may be lost in the removal of the Confederate statues. No less an art lover than President Donald J. Trump bemoaned “the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks.”

But are these works beautiful and, more to the point, are they art? ...

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