To do this, Munson has put together a collection of journalistic portraits of some of the institutions -- the National Endowment for the Arts, museum bureaucracies, art history at Harvard -- that characterize the contemporary art world. The result is a small book of surprising weight and substance, provocative in the best sense. You might draw different conclusions than Munson does from her reporting, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a swifter, more fact-chunky short treatment of the framework within which the contemporary arts operate.

Munson herself is only 32, but she has deep-dyed conservative credentials. Bred in the Chicago suburbs, she spent a few teenage moments supporting Gary Hart, then found her path. At Northwestern, she majored first in political science, got bored with the lefty bent of the department's faculty and switched to art history. (While at Northwestern, she met and became friendly with Joseph Epstein, then editing the American Scholar, whom she describes as an "informal mentor.") She also edited the Northwestern Review, a conservative newspaper. That led to a stint in Washington doing research assistance for Lynne Cheney at the National Endowment for the Humanities. When the Bush years ended, she moved with Cheney over to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

The idea for "Exhibitionism" came to her when she looked into pursuing her art history studies at a graduate level -- despite being a Washington policy wonk, she'd maintained friendships with artists and art scholars. She quickly realized that what she was looking for didn't exist. "A connoisseurial, object-centered education in art history is not to be had anymore," she says categorically. So she decided to write a book about how this came to be. (She says that when she's bugged by something, her impulse is to "get on the horn, get into the primary sources and find out who the best sources are.") She spent three years in New York researching and writing "Exhibitionism." Salon spoke with Munson during her book tour.

How would you describe the story you're telling?

My goal was to put forward hard evidence as to what may have sparked the art wars -- and to chart very carefully the kinds of changes that have taken place during the postmodern era that fundamentally altered the focus and mission of our arts institutions.

Pretend you're on "Crossfire." What two or three points do you want to be sure to get across?

That shock art is the safest kind of art that an artist can go into the business of making today. That the real mavericks of our time have been working quietly and carefully for years in their studios producing wonderful work few people have seen. And that even though the NEA is not the cause of the various ills we've seen, it is to a great degree an embodiment of the problem.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"