A great podcast by two of my favorite people on Substack! I'm frustrated by cultural progressives for many of the same reasons Kat and Ruy are.
I agree that boring, lecturing art is a lot less fun and less interesting that art that's just trying to entertain people or move them or make them laugh. However, I'm never quite sure it's fair to call a piece of art "objectively" good or bad. While Orwell was great at calling out intolerant and conformist thinking among artists and intellectuals (like people who produced or praised Soviet-style art), he also wrote in "Writers and Leviathan":
“I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever -- any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is 'good' or 'bad' -- every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually 'I like this book' or 'I don't like it' and what follows is a rationalisation."
A great podcast by two of my favorite people on Substack! I'm frustrated by cultural progressives for many of the same reasons Kat and Ruy are.
I agree that boring, lecturing art is a lot less fun and less interesting that art that's just trying to entertain people or move them or make them laugh. However, I'm never quite sure it's fair to call a piece of art "objectively" good or bad. While Orwell was great at calling out intolerant and conformist thinking among artists and intellectuals (like people who produced or praised Soviet-style art), he also wrote in "Writers and Leviathan":
“I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever -- any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is 'good' or 'bad' -- every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually 'I like this book' or 'I don't like it' and what follows is a rationalisation."
If the Democrats refuse to move away from being the school marms, I'm waiting anxiously for GenZ to topple them.