"The best art is often powerfully irrelevant."

Not much time to write this morning before work (or in general since going to Milwaukee last week). Sorry, I haven't replied to comments yet either.

I wanted to note this---after I'd blogged that great works of imagination are not necessarily "meant to make you" do/feel/think anything, I saw in the Guardian (11/2/19) this interview with Edwin Frank, the head of the New York Review of Books Classics series (with the always great covers):

"The best art is often powerfully irrelevant".

He's not discussing the same thing, but it's related.
He is "extremely suspicious" of the idea of relevancy, he says.

"I prefer the idea of currency, which is not quite the same as relevance. A book that has currency puts our present concerns in a different but distinct perspective.

"I am looking for a book that still has the power to surprise: not just shock effects, but some sense of lived experience that is still palpable. I tend to be interested in books that have some sense of historical horizon and occasion: the notion that, though this was another time, we can see our own time in it as well."

Yes: "some sense of lived experience that is still palpable".