The Day the Music Critic Died

In 1996, when the great American critic Susan Sontag returned to her groundbreaking collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), she had the following to say about those intervening years: “What I didn’t understand… was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people, and when allowed — as an arbitrary decision of temperament — probably unhealthy, too.”