Countering academic, external, and internal critics of Western Culture, such as dismissive attitudes toward the legacy of "dead white European males", Culture Counts reveals Western cultural contributions to moral education, defends traditional architecture and figurative painting, and urges renewed respect for the positive achievements of Western civilization.

And two are still-life compositions in which he has placed flowers in front of one of his figurative paintings and done what he calls ``a painting from a painting.

They could endorse and help maintain this official refusal of reality, or they could resist it, becoming, so to speak, refuses of refusal--probing the conditions of nationalism, war, UN sanctions, and social disintegration with a spectrum of practices ranging from figurative painting to public interventions, from performance art to critique of media representation and neo-Conceptualist tactics.