(no subject)

But hold up for a minute: Who is this “we” that’s always turning up in critical writing anyway? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middle-brow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say we, I mean I. I mean you.

The above-quote is from the below-linked article/commentary I read. While I think it fails to offer a fully satisfying answer or even suggested-answer to its own titular question, there's a lot of really interesting thought to chew on here.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/

Cross-posted thoughts from my tumblr:

I think this is very relevant to my feelings on fandom and what I have, in recent years, come to call “tumblr fandom” in particular. I don’t know why, but in my personal experience of tumblr it felt like Captain America: The Winter Soldier was the watershed moment when this happened to the collective shift in the way fandom-thought is processed in the public and critical eye on this platform. We went from courteously-warning individuals of content they might find disturbing or displeasing as a courtesy to almost feeling like if we needed to tag something with a content warning that we needed to apologize for liking it. We, we, we, we, we.