As the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh once said to Bookforum , “A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness.”

Most elites believed that “art” described a rarified sphere...which stood in opposition to the "mass culture" of bland, sensationalist, lowest-common-denominator works made for profit. There was no confusing the two worlds, because there was a very high bar for what qualified as “art.” The avant-garde concept of art was something like “creative alt

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