The day the music critic died (opens in new tab)

In 1996, when the great American critic Susan Sontag returned to her groundbreaking collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), she had the following to say about those intervening years: “What I didn’t understand… was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standard...