“Perhaps the biggest reason why intellectuals excoriated entertainment was that they understood all too well their own precariousness in a world dominated by it. For whatever the overt content of any particular work, entertainment as a whole promulgated an unmistakable theme, one that took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values. That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, or the id over the superego, of Dionysian abandon of Apollonian harmony. Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.”
Source: Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (1998), p. 21
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Neal Gabler 1
American journalist 1950Related quotes

Original: (it) In tutto il mondo, per chi ne fa parte, musica, intrattenimento ed arte sono un'opera di emozioni: siatene grati.
Source: prevale.net
Notes to The Atrocity Exhibition (1970; written 1967 - 1969, annotated 1990)
Context: All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonise past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.

“Americans are the most over-entertained people on the face of the earth.”
Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIsdCfmkEho with Dennis Hunt in Las Vegas, c. 1982

“Art is the triumph over chaos.”
The Stories of John Cheever Knopf (1978).
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 65–66

“Judaism is an intellectually based religion, and the single most important theme is that of study.”
Seventy faces: articles of faith (2002)
Quote from Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, Taschen Köln, 2006, p. 15
1990s - 2000s

"Against Identity Politics" https://web.archive.org/web/20180823073547/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/americas/2018-08-14/against-identity-politics (14 August 2018), Foreign Affairs
2010s