Tag: reception

Why do we click with some works of art and not others? Why does it bother us when we feel deeply connected to a song, painting, movie or book that our friends don’t connect with? Rita Felski uses the word attunement for this process of “clicking”, and she’s interested in how unpredictable it is. It’s tempting to try and predict in advance what art you will or won’t attune to, but it’s important to remember that art always has the potential to surprise you – even years after you first experience it.

When we think about the generation before us, we might feel that their cultural touchstones aren’t relevant today. But Tom Mole argues that the literature of the past only survives because the next generation find new ways to make it relevant. In the Victorian era, new illustrations for the previous generation’s poetry helped update the image of writers like Byron and Wordsworth in ways they couldn’t even have imagined.