Urban Intellectual Fodder is the prozac of the American intelligentsia.
It's studiedly smart; it's properly elliptical; it's quite self-aware and often very meta; it is extensively footnoted, either actually or mentally; its distance from its material is either ironically remote or uncomfortably close-up; it is intensely minimal or wordy or effects-ridden, in either a refined or extravagant way; it specializes in conceits, and sometimes its conceit is to be devoid of one; and it makes its small points, and sometimes its big obvious ones, in either a very guarded or rather grandiosely ironical way.
Critic James Wood coined a name for it: “hysterical realism.” Dale Peck had a name for it, too: “recherche postmodernism.” Both ain't half bad.
You know who and what I mean: everyone you imbibe by book, CD, movie or artwork creates Urban Intellectual Fodder.
All it does is put a sheen of high-brow smarts on art that is actually middle-brow. And comes out bloodless.
I agree largely, but so what? Isn't it up to each of us to keep searching for the real stuff (the stuff that does challenge us and not just reassure us that we are smart and sophisticated). There's a lot of people (unfortunately a growing list) that I just don't read or listen to because as I get older, and realise how finite life is, I ask myself should I read this or re-read Ulysses or the Great Gatsby, or listen to Dylan, one more time? Sure it's annoying that the world is full of pretentious nonsense parading as serious art, but so what the choice is ours each and everytime. If you're truly discriminating it is hardly a problem.
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