Red Skies at Night

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“That’s why we get so betrayed by the knowledge of appropriations, because we’re holding art to this very weird standard where it is actually about us. It’s about our own lives. It’s not about the artist’s life. Sometimes we want to be fooled, too. It’s silly that people can be so complicated, but then again we don’t have any other model. And a lot of us want to be fooled at the same time we get angry that we’re fooled. We want the artist to be a kind of Houdini who does magic tricks. And then we simultaneously want to find out that it’s an esoteric, comes from an esoteric place where we could never understand how the magic was made. And we want the cards to be turned over so we can understand and make the person seem humble and normal and like us. And then we get angry at them for just being a normal humble person. So what we want is very problematic.“

From A Conversation with Jonathan Lethem, discovered via the LPV Digest.