There’s a piece in the N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine by Daniel B. Smith titled “What Is Art For?” If you ask me art’s only function is to be. But if you’re asking what purpose it serves, I’ve always believed the Tom Wolfe proclamation that its primary raison d’etre is to allow the art world’s benefactors — the stinking rich — to present themselves as hipper, wiser and more soulful than those who don’t support it, and thereby place themselves a notch higher on the social totem pole.

Some of the terminology and references from Wolfe’s The Painted Word (’75) are obviously dated, but the basic through-line is still dead-on.

Neil Young has written the most visionary, sharply focused and concisely written manifesto about how to save the Big Three car companies that I’ve seen anywhere.

“Hillary Clinton is probably ready to ankle out of the Senate,” N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes in her 11.16 column, titled “Team of Frenemies.” “The point of the Senate was to be a staging area for her presidential race, and that’s done.

“She’s not a player there. Her bid to get the health care issue away from Ted Kennedy was stymied recently when Kennedy refused her request to create a special subcommittee that she would head.

“And why should the woman who made 18 million cracks go back to being junior to Chuck Schumer, if she could be toasted from Dublin to Dubai?

“On the down side, Hillary would be taking over a big and demoralized government bureaucracy, after proving with her campaign that she does not know how to run a big and demoralized group of people.

“On the up side, she would never have to exaggerate her foreign policy résumé again; this time, she really would be brokering peace and flying into places where they’d try to fire at her.

“And if she worked hard enough — and she would — she could restore clarity to Foggy Bottom, the striped-pants center of diplomacy so maligned and misused by W. and Dick Cheney on their Sherman’s march to war in Iraq and in their overwrought bid to become the only hyperpower.

“If Barry chooses Hillary as secretary of state, a woman who clearly intimidated him and taught him to be a better pol in the primaries, it doesn’t signal the return of the Clinton era. It says the opposite: If you have a president who’s willing to open up his universe to other smart, strong people, if you have a big dog who shares his food dish, the Bill Clinton era is truly over.

“Appointing a Clinton in the cabinet would be so un-Clintonian.”

Asked by the N.Y. Times‘ Deborah Solomon about Barack Obama‘s choice of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff, Karl Rove replies as follows: “I raised a question as to whether this would be the best use of Emanuel’s talents. If you’re trying to work through a big legislative priority, it is sort of hard if you have a guy who has a reputation as a tough, hard, take-no-prisoners, head-in-your-face, scream-and-shout, send-them-a-dead-fish partisan.”

Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle narrating a N.Y. Times still-montage piece about the shooting of his film last year in India.

Taped to ticket window in lower Manhattan’s Angelika Film Center — Saturday, 11.15, 7:15 pm.

Australia’s website has been revamped and re-launched. It may be the most fluidly visual and eye-candy-ish movie site I’ve ever laid eyes on. Some 200 pics from the film, 20-plus short clips, interactive, whistles and bells.

The weather, I mean. An excellent museum and movie-watching day.

There’s a certain distinction in being the absolute last Hollywood-feeding site to post the new Watchmen trailer. The truth is that I was too lazy to get around to it until now.