The Successor Caste

 The expansion of corporationist, bureaucratic, and etatist trends that we have noted on the political side can also be seen, indeed scarcely are to be avoided, in the arts. Cyril Connolly once wrote, "better a state which can't read or write than one which begins to take a positive interest in literature." But it is not only a matter of the state. There is also a proliferation, well past the reasonable, of what we might call cultural nongovernmental organizations, especially in the United States. These last are, usually, Foundations, often created by millionaires but after a transition period end up promoting various social and other agendas alien to the intentions of their founders. In the case of the arts, many of the successor caste succumb to fashions emanating from art activists (and not affecting the economic or economic-social attitudes of millionairedom).

- Robert Conquest in The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History