Matt Ashby and Brendan
Carroll on why irony is ruining our culture:
"Percy Shelley famously
wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For
Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of
its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed
out of the room. Lazy cynicism has replaced thoughtful conviction as the mark
of an educated worldview. Indeed, cynicism saturates popular culture, and it
has afflicted contemporary art by way of postmodernism and irony. Perhaps no
recent figure dealt with this problem more explicitly than David Foster
Wallace. One of his central artistic projects remains a vital question for
artists today: How does art progress from irony and cynicism to something
sincere and redeeming?..."
Click here
for the full column in Salon.