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Sarah's avatar

This was wonderful to read. I feel like I see so many people - even private people, speaking away from the eyes of the Internet - who can only engage with art now by standing outside their experience, watching themselves watch the art, ready to intervene quickly if it seems it might not make them a “better” person. There’s a smug derision even among self-styled artists for non-didactic work; and any work that is both non-didactic *and* regarded as potentially morally important must immediately have its non-didacticism turned into a lesson, proof somehow that art that’s too “serious” is elitist - and therefore does not engender empathy. It often doesn’t seem that they’re having a lot of fun creating, or talking about other people’s creation.

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Caleb Beers's avatar

Really enjoyed this. There is a certain brazenness to your writing, an utter disregard for what the Very Smart People think. There's also a subtly acerbic tone that I relish. It is apparent in this paragraph:

"Happy, too, are the aspiring painter’s or poet’s middle-class parents, for whom art that preaches empathy has a ring of pragmatism about it. Their child is not a dreamy layabout. He’s a sort of one-person NGO."

Ouch.

I also want to note that even the most moralizing of premodern art, such as passion plays, still has a certain universality because it is based on a transcendent foundation. If we reject all metanarratives and any notion of transcendence, we're left with a sort of insipid social morality. And that's how we commit the tremendous stupidity of basing our morality on "empathy."

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