“A Tract for the Times” – Edgar Wind’s 1960 Reith Lectures

In the last months of 1960, the art historian and philosopher Edgar Wind delivered that year’s BBC Reith Lectures, which made him a well-known public intellectual. Under the title of Art and Anarchy, Wind criticized throughout six lectures several aspects of modern art. Wind’s critiques, even though the end result of a lifetime of historical research and philosophical speculation on the artistic phenomenon, were formulated in response to contemporary events. According to Wind, Art and Anarchy was a tract for the times. This article describes the reasons why Wind was invited by the BBC to deliver the Reith Lectures of 1960, examines the aims of his critique vis-à-vis the artistic developments of those years, and evaluate his position as a public intellectual questioning the assumption that a wide diffusion of art was intrinsically good for society.