- “My discomfort with our current use of “relevance” as a term of judgment is that it conceals its criteria, and that those criteria are not aesthetic, but social and political. I worry that if we make such “relevance” not just one among other judgments we might make about art, but a condition of our interest, we have made that condition purely... See more

- “The way we talk about relevance suggests that it is a quality a work possesses, something an author has engineered or achieved, an accomplishment. This, too, seems wrong to me. Relevance may have more to do with the audience; it is a quality of our reading at least as much as an attribute of what we read.”

I know people who get angry just from hearing the word authenticity . They insist it doesn’t exist. It never existed. It can’t possibly exist.

And maybe in their lives, as digitally constructed, it doesn’t.

This is the flip side of our culture of artificiality. Anything that threatens the dominant fakeness with reality stirs up an intense backlash.... See more