The demand for transparent, topical art compounds the reductions of calculative reason.

Evidence

Patience, distance, circumnavigation, imaginative distortion, and prolonged attention are resources and mitigants for disastrous mechanization—and they are forsworn by urgency, however well meant. Applicative reason reduces critical thinking and creative exploration to profit maximization, problem solving, and vocational training—and then we worsen those reductions in demanding topical, transparent art. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 39

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that demanding ‘topical, transparent art’ worsens applicative reason is a direct provocation to politically-engaged-art debates and connects to her Antitheory fight. — connects to: Art’s specifically rational act is a reduction of the apparatus of appearance — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 834; The rationality of art grows as society’s irrationality grows — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 832; An artist’s public persona can be used to domesticate genuinely opaque artworks — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1149