It’s become too easy of late to be rude about Alain de Botton. His banal aphoristic “insights” and homilies on Twitter, his efforts to turn the media away from “meanness” (news should provide moral uplift and teach us how to be better people), his plea for museums to emulate churches by replacing their “bland captions” with a set of moral “commands”, thereby using the art in their collections to make us “good and wise and kind”, have all begun to PALL somewhat. He seems to forget that the power of art has little to do with any straightforward sense of the narrative content of a work, but resides in formal relationships. It’s like looking to the words in a Bach oratorio rather than to the structure of the music to try to understand why it so profoundly moves us. I’m not sure whether de Botton is being merely stupid or simply patronising.