Challenging art teaches you that lesson [that you are not yet what you could be]; great art insists on it. A great novel is, among other things, a document that is more human than human, that goes further than it has to in the effort to convey the human experience. A great, challenging novel knows things you don’t, says things that will not flatter you, and will not stop doing its work until it’s rearranged something in your chest. And who could stand that? We’ve spent years learning that discomfort is always, always a sign of harm. And so we took the only reasonable action a therapeutic civilization could take with an art form built on productive discomfort: we got rid of it. We replaced it with #content, which is art that has agreed as a condition of existence never to ask anything of you at all.
— Freddie deBoer • “A Plea for Art: Against the Tyranny of Our Poptimist Dystopia”
His partial etiology isn’t convincing, tempting though it may be because I share his animus for real coddling I do observe around me. Even the phenomenon for which he is attempting provide an etiology is questionable: There’s nothing new about people shying away from demanding art, whether the demand is moral, as he seems mostly to have in mind here, or cognitive, owing to formal obscurity.
But I could sing his partial definition of a great novel.