It was a clear and sunny evening, and the neoclassical lines and shadows of the federal buildings were putting on a show. Most of the photographs you’ve seen of Washington were taken under these conditions.

The woman at the To Call booth at the Warner Theater asked UD for identification and then watched, pitying, as UD scrounged and scrounged for her passport. “That’s okay. No need. You’re okay.”

Inside, the crowd was loud. Talked up a storm, at the top of their lungs.

The smell of chardonnay hit you — as Bob Dylan put it in another context — like a freight train.

The Warner Theater looked a little shinier than she remembered from last year, but it had the same provincial movie theater aesthetic. Excessive gold ornamentation around the stage reminded UD of Mexican churches.

Everyone either looked like me, or looked like someone I knew.

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“The Clarity of Things: What is American about American Art?” was Updike’s somewhat pedestrian title, but UD was prepared to prefer the intellectual precision it seemed to promise over the vague portentousness of a lot of Jeffersons she’d attended.

On stage, a dully redundant PowerPoint presentation featured iconic American images — Dorothea Lange photos, etc. Sometimes the screen offered words of wisdom about art and America from the head of the NEH, who was about to introduce Updike.

The PowerPoint stopped and the curtain went up. There sat the Army band, wearing elaborate red uniforms. The crowd – slender, bejeweled, swigging wine – ignored their Sousa marches.

Drummers get a lot to do in these military bands. UD always feels bad for drummers in classical orchestras who wait thirty minutes for two bangs.

The music was bold and glorious and upbeat.

“What if you were going to give a nihilistic Jefferson?” UD asked Mr. UD. “This music would be all wrong.”

“It’s the federal government. You can’t be nihilistic.”

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UD hates the big video that floats above and to the right of the NEH guy as he introduces the show. It’s a small theater, and everyone can see the actual man. We don’t need to see a blown-up video of the man. “Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens,” he says.

Then begins the curious character of the entire evening. The Jefferson, this year, will be an extended advertisement for a recent NEH initiative that brings reproductions of iconic American images into primary and secondary schools. Not only will we now be forced to watch a video touting it, but Updike’s talk will also promote it.

Having reminded us that the Jefferson is the “highest honor the federal government bestows for the humanities,” the head of the NEH introduces Updike.

Like the other recent recipients UD’s seen — Harvey Mansfield, Tom Wolfe — Updike is a remarkably well-preserved old guy. Has a resonant, melodious voice too. After the tedium, and then the military rituals, of the opening bits, UD’s anticipating some substance. She knows Updike’s got a pretty prose style. At the very least, this is going to be well-written.

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Maybe what’s most American about us, he suggests, is “our obsession with defining what is American.” This is amusing and, again, promising. Let’s step on the gas.

But first some gear-grinding. He’s going to be talking about “that least hip of demographics: white Protestant males of Northern European extraction… thin-lipped patriarchal persons.” Fine, fine, move it along…

Even as Updike revs up, UD senses that this Jefferson presentation will have… not the problem of too ambitious an argument (this did in Wolfe and Mansfield), but no argument at all. What we’re going to get is a PowerPoint presentation of many of the same iconic American images we saw as we entered, with random, well-written commentary on them. One of our best prose stylists is going to share his impressions of some paintings with us.

The images – from Copley, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Grant Wood, Hopper – are in themselves compelling, so one sits happily enough, taking them in. UD really liked this one, Homer’s The Undertow:

As Updike spoke of the beauty of these pictures, a sort of argument crept by me upon the waters — that American art is about rendering the empirical clarity of things, while European art tends more to the conceptual. But this is too broad a claim to be convincing, so UD waits for elaboration.

The elaboration gets a bit strange. Updike praises the hyperrealism of many American canvases celebrating technology (precisionist renderings of the wheels of trains, idealized images of Ford Motor plants) as ultimately spiritual in nature, offering a “purity and silence that reduces machinery to its spiritual Newtonian essence.” He quotes Jonathan Edwards discerning the “link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things,” and concludes with William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.”

That last bit, from Williams, pretty much summed up Updike’s Jefferson: He gave us the undeniably stirring clarity of beautiful things projected out of the darkness, but offered no ideas to go with them. So we got beautiful pictures and beautiful Updike prose — in itself a surpassingly pleasant experience — but nothing to give them meaning.