Full quote from Susan Sontag's essay (Thirty Years Later):<p><pre><code> What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) is 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 standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, “unrealistic,” to most people; and when allowed, as an arbitrary decision of temperament, probably unhealthy, too.
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I found the full version of the essay here:<p><a href="https://www.threepennyreview.com/thirty-years-later/" rel="nofollow">https://www.threepennyreview.com/thirty-years-later/</a>