Earlier this week, The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg, one of the more nuanced pop culture writers around, published a piece titled “Art is about surrender. Stop asking for it to be custom-tailored.”
Framed as a rejection of the worrying, internet-age tendency to demand narratives that suit audience expectations — not to mention the even more worrying impulse to attack and threaten artists personally for failing to deliver the pre-fab stories some audience members crave to a frightening and pathetic degree — Rosenberg’s piece is reasonable enough.
