This is excellent. I think I narrowly avoided getting sucked into the trap César Aira talks about here. ht books.substack.com/p/diary-on-the
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For a while here on twitter, there was what I call a "taste mafia" really invested in figuring out what was "actually good" or "actually bad". It always gave me the heebie-jeebies. I have a better idea why now.
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One of the lost insights of modernism was in connecting taste and connoisseurship to artistic stagnation. That's been a foundational concept for just about every important artistic movement since the mid 1800s, from the Salon des Refusés on up.
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Absolutely. This becomes super clear once you produce a certain amount of stuff, whatever the quality.
Have you read Edward Said's "On Late Style"? It develops many of these themes but in a sense in the opposite way. A postmodern ironic embrace of "quality" in an irrational baroque form, knowing that it is obsolete as a source of meaning.
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And one of the reasons why MFA programs are so infamously unproductive. Only a small minority of graduates go on to have careers. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a focus on generic quality or craft definitely plays an important role.

