The praise of reviewers tends to be bland and uninformative, with exceptions. One can be certain that an actor’s “riveting” performance was far worse than usual, and that a “lyrical” novel will be unreadable.
Aug 192021
Seeming
Religion, art, taste, and other delusions.
Aug 182021
You don’t need to love what I love, just hate what I hate.
Aug 052021
Technology makes all our dreams come true, nightmares included.
Jul 292021
The pretense that empty and prolix speeches are noble, that pedestrian performances are scintillating, that crude and mawkish poetry is stirring and profound — this celebration of kitsch is the most degrading aspect of official public spectacle.
Jul 162021
There ought to be a small but discernible difference between your favorites and what you think best: a large difference is snobbery, and no difference is also snobbery, of an opposite kind.
Jul 142021
The worst disaster in the movies is to find a bag of money.
Jul 072021
A taste for bad people sometimes indicates a defect of character; a taste for bad art always does.
Jun 232021
What makes an established religion? The power to punish blasphemy.
Jun 212021
The more that is shown, the less that is suggested; and to show everything, suggesting nothing, is pornography, regardless of the subject.
May 312021
The contemporary doctrine that art should shock, and the greater the shock the better the art, is the last twilit ruin of Longinian aesthetics — sublimity for a jaded age.