Reply to C.

Oh, come on C. If you don't think it is morbid then you just aren't paying enough attention. And as for Q, it is not awkwardly Hip, Gomeshi just thinks he is hip when he isn't. The entire paradigm of art and philosophy has shifted and Gomeshi and his cohorts are stuck in the past. Canada reads for example is like people getting together 50 years after Gutenberg started the printing-press revolution and talking about what were the year's best illuminated manuscripts. There has been a fundamental paradigm change in western civilization which started sometime around the beginning of the Victorian Era and its implications are just now becoming clear. The entire notion of art in all its forms grew into crisis because of the decline in religion was not met with any equivalent project which could define the purpose of aesthetic expression. The Romantics seemed to point to a way out but with the industrial revolution this got lost. Some Victorian authors used social activism in art as a kind of guiding light but this could not sustain the aesthetic project for very long because Capitalism effectively turns everything into a spectacle. Anyway, we are now on ground which is shifting so fast and unevenly that it many people are holding on to aesthetic paradigms which were vital a hundred years ago, as though to be comforted in their traditions. But these will not protect them and Q will only be a comfort for so long.