Good morning. I was on an airplane all day Monday—at least it felt like it—returning home from a week in Victoria, and I was unable to get to Prufrock. Apologies. I’ve got a trip to Austria (for my daughter’s wedding) and Switzerland coming up in June, and I may have to skip one or two days again, but otherwise I’ll keep this newsletter going throughout the summer without pause.
In Tablet, William Deresiewicz argues that we get the art we deserve. “Art is boring now,” he writes, “because we are boring. Art is woke because we are woke. Art is bland and unimaginative because we have landed ourselves in the lamentable position of getting exactly what we want.”
Deresiewicz gives a brief explanation as to how we got here. He blames the Puritans and “the moral energies of Anglo-Calvinism, in all its joyless, witch-hunting glory.” (For the record, we Calvinists have nothing on the Catholics, who were witch-hunting extraordinaires.) He blames the normalization of art through institutions like the university, the NEA, and the NEH. He blames French theory. He blames the popularization of that theory (“wokeness”) in contemporary culture. He blames social media. He blames the corporatization of publishing and the decreasing number of quality independent publishers.
There is some truth in all of this, of course, though Deresiewicz perhaps idealizes the period between the wars, where artists also suffered from lack of financial support (remember Ezra Pound’s “Bel Esprit” scheme to support T. S. Eliot?) and were constrained by social mores. It has always been such. But Deresiewicz concludes that there are still great writers and artists out there:
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