What Is Utah?

After visiting Phoenix, I had a few open days. I’d never been to Salt Lake City and knew little about it that seemed reliably true. I naturally look at received wisdom not with disdain but with my mother’s voice in my head. “Don’t believe everything you read” is common sense, but we live in uncommonly addled times. To Utah I went. And what is Utah? America is a big, colorful, motley country, but Utah is a storied anomaly. Brigham Young said “This is the place” in 1847, affirming to a harassed, tired, but fervent cohort that at last they had found a home. Is it a place for art?

Utah and the Mormons aren’t known for it, though Wayne Thiebaud, who I think was the best painter of his era, was a Mormon, not practicing, but by upbringing. Mormons, by the by, are abstemious when it comes to booze, tobacco, caffeine, and sex outside of marriage, but, I learned, they have a keen, even rapacious sweet tooth.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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After visiting Phoenix, I had a few open days. I’d never been to Salt Lake City and knew little about it that seemed reliably true. I naturally look at received wisdom not with disdain but with my mother’s voice in my head. “Don’t believe everything you read” is common sense, but we live in uncommonly addled times. To Utah I went. And what is Utah? America is a big, colorful, motley country, but Utah is a storied anomaly. Brigham Young said “This is the place” in 1847, affirming to a harassed, tired, but fervent cohort that at last they had found a home. Is it a place for art?

Utah and the Mormons aren’t known for it, though Wayne Thiebaud, who I think was the best painter of his era, was a Mormon, not practicing, but by upbringing. Mormons, by the by, are abstemious when it comes to booze, tobacco, caffeine, and sex outside of marriage, but, I learned, they have a keen, even rapacious sweet tooth.