liez

i often wonder if we must lie to be relevant for any period of time. does the truth contain enough nuance to be a lasting bedfellow? take, for example, the medium of web logs. i relate my version of the truth to my two and a half readers, but not a day goes by that i don’t scribble down some fiction as well (i’m assuming that i can still distinguish between the two). it is sad that pitchfork, one of my favorite music review sites, seems to believe provocation is more important than honesty. from slate:

Altruism, though, doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility of a political agenda—a provocation aimed not at readers, but at the music scene at large. What else is a 3.3 review of an otherwise-lauded Dandy Warhols album than an attempt to poke holes in an established critical consensus? In this case, it's the numbers that speak volumes and not the writing. A recent post on the blog Crooked Timber opined thusly: "[Pitchfork's writers] want to preserve their own role as … arbiters of taste." Therefore, Schreiber must continually "inject certain amounts of aesthetic uncertainty into the marketplace, by deliberately writing reviews which suggest that bad artists are good, or that good artists are bad." In that case, there's only way to cancel out the Pitchfork Effect: Read a different Web site.