"For All Its Good Intentions, Art That Tries to Minister to Its Audience by Showcasing Moral Aspirants and Paragons or the Abject Victims of Political Oppression Produces Smug, Tiresome Works That Are Failures Both as Art and as Agitprop"

"If good art and its criticism can free us from anything, it can free us, first and foremost, from the totalizing fantasies that are fed by such images—whether of mountains shot by fascists, or of the perfect faces generated by algorithms, or of a society cleansed of its treacherous elites or deplorables. It can liberate us, in other words, from the comforting delusion that we can ever transcend our human limits, defeat death, unhappiness and evil once and for all, or live in anyone’s vision of heaven on earth."

Anastasia Berg at The Point dicusses the "aesthetic turn."