Another drive-by quote post: here’s Lincoln Michel discussing surrealism and, more broadly, the interpretation of art. A bit from near the end:

We live in an era of simplistic interpretations where across the political spectrum people expect art to be some kind of moral instruction. If something is unreal, it must be straightforward allegory and that allegory better have the right political message. These readers seek art that reflects their own values back at them rather than what challenges their perceptions or inspires new ways of thinking.

This resonates with Jo McNeil’s newsletter from yesterday, which in turn resonates with Sam Kriss’s nerd hegemony critique. I’m clipping these things because, as is presumably obvious, they reflect my own growing sense that we’re in an overly-literal cultural phase right now, but also because I seem to be seeing more and more people saying so.

(That may be confirmation bias, of course—but as the Bear suggested, maybe leaning into confirmation bias is useful in the context of social-scale epistemic shifts.)

More to the point, I get the feeling that the visibility of this complaint is an indication that a shift is very much in the offing: when heresy becomes commonplace, the church’s grip is slipping.