Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss on Ariana Grande’s disturbing turn. Liel Leibovitz on the trouble with “Ted Lasso.” Two Drinks with Al Roth, the Nobel laureate who thinks buying an organ is fine. The young man who quit finance to become a vagabond. And more!

But first: Caitlin Flanagan wants to tear down a Los Angeles museum.

Not all art is created equal. Human beings have understood this ever since a guy drew a woolly mammoth on the wall of a cave—and have argued, sometimes ferociously, about what deserves to be lauded, and what can be consigned to the dustbin of history.

When we do this, we’re really asking some of life’s big questions: What’s meaningful? What makes us feel something? What will still be true a century from now?

But then along came a theory that caused art history to eat itself from the inside out. It decreed that valuing some things more than others was problematic, actually. There should be no hierarchy. And the Western canon isn’t based on an objective sense of truth and beauty but on racism, colonialism, bigotry.

Critical theory, as it’s known, has become an orthodoxy of the art elite—and it has seeped into the institutions they run.

Which brings us to the newly renovated Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which was once the largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi—but now, according to our columnist Caitlin Flanagan, looks more like a sinister garage sale.

Michael Govan, the CEO of the museum, scoffs at that idea. To quote him: “We’re going to create knowledge by putting things in categories and distinguishing.” And so, writes Caitlin, in the new LACMA artworks from wildly different eras and areas are jumbled up together, for no discernible reason: “Sumerian relief structures next to black-and-white photographs and, depending on the day, a performance artist on a bicycle pedaling around.”

The message is this: “They’re all the same.”

“Would it be churlish,” asks Caitlin, “to point out that if people hadn’t been creating knowledge by ‘putting things in categories and distinguishing,’ Govan wouldn’t be able to preside over a museum that hangs in midair?”

The truth is, if more of our museums fall to this destructive philosophy, future generations will never benefit from the knowledge that allowed Govan to take a sledgehammer to categories: the knowledge of how artists are linked, how one era followed another, how new styles were born. A knowledge of art history, in other words.

And Caitlin, for one, doesn’t want that to happen.

”I visited the new LACMA three times over two weeks, and it radicalized me,” she writes in today’s essay. “Here was the first museum I’ve ever wanted to tear down.”

Caitlin Flanagan • Culture and Ideas Caitlin Flanagan: How to Wreck a Museum

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Liel Leibovitz • Culture and Ideas

The Joyless Return of ‘Ted Lasso’

“Watching the first episode of the new season of Ted Lasso is a little like running into your ex at the mall,” writes Liel Leibovitz. “First comes a burst of involuntary excitement—remember all those wonderful biscuits your ex used to bake?” Then, upon closer look, you realize: “Now I remember why we broke up.” As Liel sees it, that’s because the new season, released on Wednesday, replaces real complexity and depth with empty progressive values—a move that pleases pundits and academics, and precisely no one else. Read story ›

Peter Coy • Two Drinks

The Nobel Laureate Who’d Buy Your Kidney

What is bad about prostitution? Why is it wrong to eat horses? If someone asks you if you know a hit man, do you call 911? For most people, these are the kind of sticky ethical dilemmas you hope to avoid—but Nobel Prize–winning economist Al Roth delights in provocative moral questions; they are the subject of his latest book. And in this week’s Two Drinks, Roth persuaded Peter Coy that buying a kidney might not be such a terrible idea, even if “some people think that not only is that a bad idea, but it’s the kind of bad idea that only bad people have.” Read story ›

Jack Raines • Things Worth Remembering

The Book That Saved Me from Wasting My Life

“You’re not just wasting your time. You’re wasting your life.” That’s the voice that rang in investor Jack Raines’s head as a young man. At age 24, he was well on his way down the “correct” professional path—he’d secured a job as a financial analyst for America’s largest logistics company, and an offer to matriculate at Columbia Business School the next fall. But then he stumbled upon Rolf Potts’s “Vagabonding.” “There are a few books in my life that have made me feel something,” he writes in today’s Things Worth Remembering. “There is only one that has ever made me do something.” Specifically, he booked a one-way ticket to Barcelona, and left everything he knew behind. Read story ›