"I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art"
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Wallace is zeroing in on a quiet bait-and-switch: television doesn’t just deliver art, it trains audiences to treat the delivery system as the main event. The line’s sting is in “promulgates,” a bureaucratic verb for something as intimate as taste, and in the way “like and depend” slides from pleasure into need. He’s describing an aesthetic that’s really a habit-forming business model. “Good art,” in this regime, isn’t what enlarges you or troubles you; it’s what keeps you watching, keeps you loyal to the channel, the show, the glow.
The subtext is Wallace’s larger worry about irony and entertainment as anesthesia. TV’s core competency is not storytelling but attention capture: it flatters the viewer, smooths discomfort, and rewards passivity with constant stimulus. Art becomes a means of maintaining the relationship between consumer and machine. The “vehicle” isn’t neutral; it nudges content toward what best sustains itself: serialized dependency, familiar tones, easily legible emotions, the illusion of intimacy with no reciprocal demand.
Context matters. Wallace was writing in the late 80s and 90s, when television was newly self-aware, commercially dominant, and increasingly skilled at turning critique into content. His point now reads like a premonition of streaming and algorithmic feeds: the platform’s success metric becomes the definition of quality. Under that logic, “good” is whatever reduces the chance you’ll turn the thing off - and the most radical art is whatever makes you willing to.
The subtext is Wallace’s larger worry about irony and entertainment as anesthesia. TV’s core competency is not storytelling but attention capture: it flatters the viewer, smooths discomfort, and rewards passivity with constant stimulus. Art becomes a means of maintaining the relationship between consumer and machine. The “vehicle” isn’t neutral; it nudges content toward what best sustains itself: serialized dependency, familiar tones, easily legible emotions, the illusion of intimacy with no reciprocal demand.
Context matters. Wallace was writing in the late 80s and 90s, when television was newly self-aware, commercially dominant, and increasingly skilled at turning critique into content. His point now reads like a premonition of streaming and algorithmic feeds: the platform’s success metric becomes the definition of quality. Under that logic, “good” is whatever reduces the chance you’ll turn the thing off - and the most radical art is whatever makes you willing to.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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