VAN Magazine
On Alex Ross’s Wagnerism: Art & Politics In the Shadow of Music

“In the very humane, reasonable, just invocation of ethical complexity, we also tell ourselves lies. Necessary lies, maybe, that allow us to keep a measure of faith and conviction—the will to resistance—in a world whose simplest certainties are also often bigoted, violent, murderous, and genocidal. Complexity is our weapon against those simplicities, but it’s double-edged. Both the illusion of ethical certainty—and also the illusion of open-ended, future-oriented, heterogeneous, individually subjective, ethically uncertain but right engagement—are at best tropes we can never rest with; at worst, the sophisticated excuses we frame, and believe in—as we nevertheless should—while the neo-Nazis gather outside.”

Image by Olivia Giovetti
Back to Essays & Stories