"I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers"
About this Quote
Spektor is defending the productive emptiness at the center of great art: the part that refuses to cash out into a tidy FAQ. By invoking Kafka, Hemingway, and Salinger, she chooses writers who are practically synonymous with aura and silence - authors whose biographies and public personas have been turned into a kind of aftermarket industry of interpretation. Her point isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-customer-service. The fantasy of being able to “call up” a genius and get definitive answers is the fantasy of frictionless meaning, where ambiguity is just a bug to be patched by the creator.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke of contemporary culture’s obsession with authorial clarification: the interview clip, the annotated lyric, the “what I really meant” thread. Spektor is pushing back against the idea that art’s job is to resolve. In her framing, the “magic” of reading isn’t the receipt of information, it’s the experience of being left with live questions you can’t outsource. The reader’s interpretive labor isn’t a second-best substitute for the author; it’s the actual point.
Contextually, it’s also a musician talking about literature in a media ecosystem that relentlessly pressures artists to explain themselves. Pop audiences are trained to demand lore, Easter eggs, and definitive canon. Spektor argues for something older and riskier: leaving meaning partially unowned, so the work can keep changing depending on who encounters it and when. Art that “has all the answers” becomes a brochure. Art that withholds stays alive.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke of contemporary culture’s obsession with authorial clarification: the interview clip, the annotated lyric, the “what I really meant” thread. Spektor is pushing back against the idea that art’s job is to resolve. In her framing, the “magic” of reading isn’t the receipt of information, it’s the experience of being left with live questions you can’t outsource. The reader’s interpretive labor isn’t a second-best substitute for the author; it’s the actual point.
Contextually, it’s also a musician talking about literature in a media ecosystem that relentlessly pressures artists to explain themselves. Pop audiences are trained to demand lore, Easter eggs, and definitive canon. Spektor argues for something older and riskier: leaving meaning partially unowned, so the work can keep changing depending on who encounters it and when. Art that “has all the answers” becomes a brochure. Art that withholds stays alive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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