Dutton, 56, grew up in Los Angeles, got his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara, spent time in India with the Peace Corps (he still twangs away at his sitar on occasion) and eventually accepted an appointment to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. A gleeful contrarian, he edits the academic journal Philosophy and Literature, and in 1996 founded the Bad Writing Award. A thinker who prefers to measure his thoughts against what actually exists, he once took time out to live with the wood carvers of the Sepik River region of New Guinea to learn what art, craft and beauty mean to them.

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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.

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Robert Altman's "Nashville" was released in 1975. We'd only recently pulled out of Vietnam; the energy crisis was upon us; Nixon had just resigned; and hardly anyone had heard of an oddly ambitious Southern governor named Jimmy Carter.

The world of filmmaking and filmgoing circa 1975 seems just as remote. The idea of studying movies in college was new and exciting; the filmmakers of the French New Wave still had some vitality; screenplays and collections of movie reviews were regularly published -- indeed, a film critic, Pauline Kael, was one of the country's most argued-over intellectuals; the annual summer onslaught of action-adventure extravaganzas was as yet unanticipated. Repertory houses showing older and foreign films could be found in many cities, and colleges were the homes of competing film series.

Most of the big hits of the 1970s were as square as they've always been, but there was always something for movie buffs to quarrel about. Had Godard blown it by embracing Maoism and video? Were Bertolucci and Bellochio really the equal of Antonioni and Fellini? Why were so few people aware of Ichikawa?

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Video tends to make everything literal and raucous. Tasty bits aren't just brought to the surface, they're made ultrabrite, and actively go after your nerve endings. This is sex as special effects and packaging, all tweaked and Photoshopped. It's sex for kids, the kind of sex you run out of energy for at about the age of 30 -- around the same time, perhaps not coincidentally, many people lose interest in new pop music. (Has anyone yet made a movie that has intriguing sensual qualities using this new pumped-up, one-blast-after-another, nonlinear language? Some would say "Fight Club," others have made a case for "Run Lola Run." I'd argue for "The Matrix." Whatever the case, there haven't been many.)

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At one point he's behind her and, with one hand on her bare belly, he uses the other to raise her arm up behind his head in a passionately nuzzling posture. Then he releases her arm and lets his free hand trail down her side, tracing her underarm and the outside curve of her breast. Baby bursts into laughter. And every time he attempts the move, the squirmy, eager girl gets the giggles. She just can't contain herself.

Finally, after a few stern, almost disgusted looks from Johnny, Baby manages to keep a straight face. Her eyes twinkle softly, and her movements and breathing slow down -- Baby has found her groove. Only now can the dance lesson proceed.

"Dirty Dancing" is the movie equivalent of a dopey juvenile novel, but it has a number of such primal scenes, and when it opened in 1987 it quickly became a surprise hit. Theaters were jammed with beaming, liquefying women of all ages, many of whom saw the movie over and over. What excited and pleased them wasn't just images of great pecs, fab butts and poppin' energy. It was the movie's portrayal of a young woman opening up to her deep sensations of lust and desire (and perhaps also the fantasy that she could come into her own, sexually, in a matter of weeks).

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"I'm not Sammy Glick," Geffen protests, referring to the unprincipled subject of Budd Schulberg's 1941 Hollywood novel "What Makes Sammy Run?" Yet of course Geffen is Sammy Glick to a T, although a contemporary, gay variation on the standard grasping, vindictive theme.

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The movie was Brian De Palma's "Mission to Mars," and only when we arrived in New York and I tuned back into the media did I learn what readers who follow the press coverage of movies already know -- that "Mission to Mars" got the year's worst reviews, a spanking almost as severe as that received by an earlier De Palma film, "Bonfire of the Vanities." (See here for Andrew O'Hehir's pan in Salon, and here for Salon's coverage of the film's unhappy reception generally.)

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They deprive themselves of the provocations and contributions of some first-class thinkers and writers who have found a place on the right. Agree or disagree with such writers as Florence King, Richard Brookhiser, James Buchanan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Francis Fukuyama, Milton Friedman, Kenneth Minogue, James Q. Wilson and Roger Scruton, you're almost certain to find more stimulation from wrestling with their arguments and points than you are from dozing through yet another recital of the familiar old lefty credos.

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These days, who knows how it'll be received? It is an art-house sex movie, and that term no longer has the allure it once did. But I found "Romance" to be one of the two or three most potent films about sex I've seen in the last few decades. And I hope to persuade you that it's something more than just some arty turn-on, though among other things it certainly is that, too.

It's quite different from "Basic Instinct," "Eyes Wide Shut" or "Nine 1/2 Weeks." No stars, no melodrama, no rock soundtrack, no flashy cutting. Instead, "Romance" is austere, even clinical. And where such gross-out date movies as "There's Something About Mary" and "American Pie" suggest food fights at the Burger King, "Romance" is like an evening spent at a four-star restaurant, lingering over the pati and snails.

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Perhaps as a consequence, there's little that makes people in publishing as wistful as talking about what they'd like to be reading. They sit back, they smile a little and their eyes search the ceiling -- this is a question they still really care about. What answers do they come up with? Suspecting that there might be something to be learned here, and with as few preconceptions as I could manage, I asked a dozen publishing people how their reading habits would change if they never had to read out of obligation again.

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Tyler Cowen, a young economics professor at George Mason University, writes about many such questions in his refreshing new look at markets and art, managing somehow to steer clear of both esthetic and neo-Marxist high-mindedness. He sets forth two arguments. The first is that, although we like to imagine that artists live and produce in defiance of the market, art has had no better friend than capitalism. Imperfect though they may be, markets have opened up opportunities and promoted diversity; they have sprung artists free from aristocratic patronage, and they have provided artists with ever more, and ever cheaper, materials.

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A consensus exists among some of the more serious, informed movie journalists and critics that all American moviemaking passion is spent. This judgment is the inevitable consequence of a widely shared interpretation of recent movie history, which goes like this: The spirit of the '60s came to Hollywood with "Easy Rider" and "Bonnie and Clyde." The public responded to a new mood; the studios, in confusion, opened their doors; for once, talent poured through the system on its own terms. Then the mood of the country turned again, a reaction set in and -- here come the '80s! -- the producers took over, delivering vacuous if shiny blasts of energy. In the '90s, we have ...

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Landsburg has now filled a book -- his second volume for the general reader -- by expanding some of his Slate columns into essay-length chapters, and framing the package with accounts of conversations he has had with his young daughter, Cayley. Even longtime Landsburg watchers will find a wealth of new delights here. He moves back and forth between his trademark outrageous stands on touchy issues -- ridiculing environmentalism and worrying about the national debt, for instance -- and the passages about Cayley. We're supposed to find her child's sense of fair play a trustworthy guide to economics, specifically Landsburg's own brand, but, as always with this writer, what's really on display is Landsburg.

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