Susan Sontag cited by Miller: “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.... In place of a hermeneutics of art we need an erotics of art.”
Unlike a more classic European operatic takedown of capitalist America—like Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s brutal “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny”— these productions seem committed to imitation rather than meaning. They never elevate their scattered details to the level of myth. The productions are a collection of curios, a dress-up that... See more
Yet what they best represent is the current state of art, where artists must skillfully package themselves as products for buyers to consume.
It’s precisely the kind of work that is uncomfortable for most artists, who by definition concern themselves with what it means to be a person in the world, not what it means to be a brand.
The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline … but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.