It is curious to the point of bafflement that one should need to rewrite Pound’s “The Serious Artist” in the year of grace 2024. Across the preceding centuries, other centers of civilization had decided that good art was a blessing and that bad art was criminal, and they had spent some time and thought in trying to find means whereby to distinguish the true art from the sham. But the wisdom of the present is freedom from history. For the living to cultivate their discernment would be needless: Art is good when it makes us feel good in ourselves and about our opinions. Still, in the age of Houellebecq as in the age of Woolf, we are asked what position the arts are to hold in the ideal republic, whatever that may be. And it is obviously the opinion of many people, the age’s foremost Shakespeareans among them, that the slop on streaming platforms is somehow related to art.
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