I want people to look harder, deeper. There’s this constant self-consciousness, self-correction; I want flow! Young people are like cattle. They don’t realize the extent to which they are now in boxes, and their free movement, free speech, and free thought have been curtailed. This is not what the ’60s were about, certainly not what the leftism of the ’60s was supposed to be about. On Facebook and Twitter, some people are making constellations of connections. Something positive will come of it, even though right now these sites seem a little banal to me. There’s something oddly provincial about them. It all just seems so high school.

You would of course agree that there’s a deep-seated narcissism to your baby-boomer generation: the self-indulgence and self-destruction are facts, now writ large in Western culture.

Oh yes, so many succumbed to drugs, to AIDS. It’s a huge loss.

So how would you contrast this narcissism with that of the Facebook and Twitter generation? What allowed the narcissists of your generation to create monumental works of art when this one seems unable to?

What monumental art are you talking about? I don’t think my generation has created monumental art.

Well, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles…

Oh, you mean music. Led Zeppelin, The Doors, The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan—yes, all tremendous. The thing is, they were coming out of repressive times, just as the Bloomsbury generation, with modernism, was coming out of repressive times. The great, seminal works of modernism were produced by people who were rebelling against something that was huge, still concrete and cohesive, whether you’re talking about Picasso, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, whoever. That’s the advantage.

It’s the same with The Rolling Stones, and that’s why I adored them. I adored Keith Richards. Finally, after Doris Day! That’s why Keith Richards was liberating for so many women like Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde—it’s interesting how a certain kind of dissonant woman gravitates towards him, because he takes a screw-it attitude towards things.

Imitators of The Rolling Stones come from a permissive, anything-goes environment, so the attitudes struck became more and more cliché. It’s like putting on a costume and donning the clothes of the real rebel. What is there now to rebel against? Music has become an industry. The Rolling Stones, at the start, were not in it for the money; they were really expressing themselves. Rock ‘n’ roll went corporate so quickly—and now you’re not going to get music of the quality of the Stones. These guys are students of the blues. Especially Keith Richards, who travels the road with a library of blues music, listening to the masters. The people inspired by The Rolling Stones aren’t going back to the originals; they’re just listening to The Rolling Stones.

How does this relate to your response to the young woman at the ROM last night who questioned your disenchantment with contemporary art’s resonance, and who cited hip-hop and graffiti as things that have influenced her?

The thing about her that was so disturbing, and I wish we had had more time to talk, is that the defects or lacks in her education were very clear. She didn’t even understand what I meant about important works of art. She didn’t have that vocabulary because she was never taught it. If I had been allowed to go on, I would have talked about how hip-hop is part of my Art of Song Lyrics class [at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia], and we present Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message.” That is an example of a work that had an influence. But has it been able to survive its own context and be transplanted out, so that you could say no cultured person in the world should be without knowledge of it, in the way you can say that about Hamlet, or Wagner, or Mozart, or The Waste Land, or Yeats? These are decisions I’m making as a critic. It’s my responsibility, I feel, to make them when other academics don’t.

Perhaps it’s that they want to be seen as youthful. Academics and critics want to embrace all contemporary art forms because they fear being pegged as out-of-it.

Hip-hop is a great style; it’s all over the world; rapping has now become a common claim from Brazil to Czechoslovakia. But what has emerged from it in terms of a free-standing work? People today, with so much to choose from, need guidance about what things are important. That’s why I wrote Break, Blow, Burn, to try to say, “These are the works you should know.” I’m talking about the difference between a style and an incredibly important work of art that everyone should know. They are two different things. This poor girl last night has never heard this kind of discussion.

You could argue about the canon in rock ‘n’ roll. There are certain things, if you’re interested in rock ‘n’ roll, that you definitely should know about. We all argue about this, but I would propose that The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” is a canonical work. Nobody who claims to understand 20th-century culture should be without knowledge of it. I would add: would people actually want to hear Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” over and over again, in the way that you can listen to “Sympathy for the Devil,” or “Gimme Shelter”? Every time you hear “Gimme Shelter” it sounds fresh. I don’t believe that’s true of Grandmaster Flash. I don’t believe it will remain fresh forever no matter how many times you play it. I think that even admirers of hip-hop would listen to it and, if asked if they wanted to play it again, would say no.

What about “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy?

It’s important. I play that in my class.

Is it that it’s too specific to its era? Hip-hop is very vernacular, very tied to trends, even when, perhaps especially when, it’s political.

A lot of it’s about riffs, too, hooks borrowed from other songs, samples. If you’re studying hip-hop, if it’s your subject, these are works that are important to know. But I’m still asking the question about works of art that somehow rise above their context and float free. When I did Break, Blow, Burn, my test for each poem was, can you reread this poem at one sitting five or six times in a row?

I don’t believe that’s true of Grandmaster Flash. “Fight the Power” has a great hook and so on and then what? It’s interesting historically for hip-hop. People say that masterpieces don’t exist anymore. I’m sorry. I believe there are masterpieces. Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” There are certain things that everybody should know, whether they like them or not. 19th-century visual art, literature, and so on. How can you know anything about literature if you know nothing about Wuthering Heights? You may not have read Tolstoy’s War and Peace but you should at least know something about it.

All of these texts are now available, in most cases for free, on the internet. Additionally, there are more aspiring artists than ever before: people are entering MFA programs in droves. So why has no important art been produced?