How Culture Got Stupid: ‘Despite the strange takeover of culture by tasteless scolds, I still believe there’s nothing better than a story that grabs you and won’t let go.’ Kat Rosenfield joins The Free Press. (Kat Rosenfield, July 13, 2024, Free Press)
Critics used to agree that the purpose of art is to explore what is true, not to model what is proper. But around the time Flynn’s breakout novel was breathing new life into the domestic thriller genre, a new breed of cultural commentator was gestating—one for whom art was understood less as a truth-seeking enterprise than as a vehicle for moral instruction.
In the early 2010s, Tumblr gave birth to an accusatory and highly influential blog titled Your Fave Is Problematic, which studiously cataloged the offenses that artists, authors, and celebrities had committed against social justice. A hallmark of YFIP was its utter collapse of the distinction between art and artist: one representative post from 2013, about YA author John Green, lists allegedly offensive comments made by Green next to quotes uttered by his fictional characters, as though they were one and the same.
Years later, in 2021, the author of YFIP revealed herself in the pages of The New York Times, admitting she was an angsty teenager when she started the blog, and had canceled people to feel better about herself. But by then, the notion that cultural criticism should be first and foremost an exercise in taking offense had taken gangrenous root—not just on social media but in the legacy press, propagated by a new generation of young, hungry, underpaid opinion writers who survived by making you hate-click.
The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:
All art was political, and always had been;
Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;
And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.
The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church. “It’s fun to think about this stuff,” pleaded one representative essay at the viral trend site Uproxx, begging readers to devote themselves to woke critique with the same enthusiasm with which they once debated the bloodlines of the Targaryen dynasty. “Are you telling me that it’s cool to argue for hours about who Azor Ahai is, but a ten-minute discussion of race, gender, and shifting sensibilities before rewatching an ’80s classic is somehow wasted time? Get out of here.”
It was inevitable that a rift would emerge between the enlightened critics and the unwashed masses who, as it turned out, would rather not undergo mandatory DEI training every time they turn on the television.
Cancel Culture being so reactionary it couldn’t help but provoke the counter-reaction. And since the counters so outnumbered the correct it wasn’t much of a fight.