Recently I happened to be reading, around the same time, Anthony Heilbut's "Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature" (1996) and James Anderson Winn's "John Dryden and His World" (1987). I was in for a surprise. When I was in college, Mann meant far more to me than neo-classical poets. Today, Mann and his concern, in his early work, with the relationship of the artist to society and of morbidity to genius seem more remote -- even alien -- than Dryden and Pope and their world of clubbable poets and scribbling polemicists. According to an unscientific survey of friends and acquaintances, I'm not alone.

Like the Augustans, we live in an age of political pamphleteering, popular drama -- and coffeehouses. In cultural time, A.D. 1999 is closer to 1699 than to 1899 or 1799. This is the result, I think, of a single profound change in Western culture: the recent and abrupt collapse of the Romantic and modernist religion of art, and the marginalization of its central figure, the angelic/demonic Originalgenie. The death of the religion of art is as remarkable as the more or less simultaneous death of Marxism, another secular creed of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 1900, new styles of music and painting could provoke controversy, even riots. In 1999, the educated public is so indifferent to style that only programmatic obscenity can attract attention -- and even that stratagem of last resort has become boring. To be sure, cities are still building monumental art museums and subsidizing symphony orchestras -- but they also throw away tax dollars on convention centers that frequently are just as empty as the culture palaces.

The situation in literature is similar. A few decades ago, writers like Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer were able to hold forth on the state of the nation on the basis of their reputations as novelists. To have political influence today, Mark Helprin has had to write speeches for Bob Dole. As late as the 1960's, "Poets Oppose War" was news in elite circles. Today, that headline would receive about as much attention as "Landscape Architects Denounce U.S. Trade Policy."

For the better part of two centuries, the artist stepped into the roles made available after revolutions stripped the aristocracy and the clergy of legitimacy. Our aristocracy today is made up of movie stars and pop musicians, not classical music composers and conductors. Our clerisy contains journalists and pundits and think-tank experts and political historians, but not novelists or poets as such. The literary figures who claim authority in political discourse do so as representatives of constituencies defined by race or sex, not on the basis of their professional accomplishments.

What explains the Artist's loss of public authority? One cause may be the spread of democracy and liberalism. In 19th-century France, Hapsburg Italy and the Soviet bloc, writers and composers like Hugo and Verdi and Solzhenitsyn could become symbols of liberal or nationalist dissent -- a function performed in liberal democracies by politicians and journalists. Meanwhile, in countries that have long been democratic, like the United States and Britain, the relaxation of censorship has eliminated another role of the Romantic-modernist artist -- that of champion of sexual liberation. Those who once would have gone for inspiration or titillation to Lawrence, Miller, Durrell, Wilde or Gide now have The Advocate -- and Larry Flynt.

But the most important factor in the decline of the religion of art may be a resurgence of common sense. The Romantic-modernist myth that the great artist is not only an accomplished, even inspired, craftsman but a mutant of superhuman facility who should be worshiped by the rest of the species was too silly an idea to be taken seriously for more than a few generations. Cicero wondered how two Roman soothsayers could pass each other in the street without bursting into laughter. One might similarly wonder about the ability of Frank Lloyd Wright to keep a straight face while looking Mies van der Rohe in the eye. Only a generation ago, the stale myth of the doomed genius in a world of philistines was still powerful enough to turn Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, not to mention Jim Morrison, into tabloid-style celebrities. Today, poets maudits are more likely than not to be grant-mongering professors in graduate creative writing programs, whose traumas are known only to their families, their employers and their H.M.O.'s.

The surviving acolytes of the Old Time Religion of art, whether to be found among the followers of Hilton Kramer or of Harold Bloom, are inclined to treat the breakup of the post-1800 Euro-American cultural constellation as the end of Western civilization. But Western civilization, broadly defined, has survived and flourished since classical antiquity without the creed of art or its appurtenances: municipal orchestras and public museums, academies and Salons des Refus