Notes On The Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa

Read the full post at - Notes On The Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa I pulled Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa off a library shelf somewhat serendipitously after reading Dubord’s The Society of the Spectacle. It had also been sitting on my reading list for a long time, so it felt like a good topic cluster read. The timing felt right for another reason. There’s been no shortage of highbrow hand-wringing lately about the state of culture. Music isn’t as good as it was in the 60s. Literature peaked in the 20s. Everything is dumbed down, flattened out, optimized for clicks. You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. It gets exhausting. Vargas Llosa — a Nobel laureate with a classically liberal outlook that is, to put it mildly, not especially fashionable at the moment — basically pushes back on the doom. His argument isn’t that the critics are wrong exactly. It’s that they’re misreading what’s actually happening. The Argument Culture isn’t dying. It’s transitioning. The…