I think a lot of people have lost the vocabulary and conceptual repertoire to engage with art on any level besides the political. As a discourse we've been honing the ideological critique skills for years and the rest has atrophied. https://twitter.com/samthielman/status/1279459225308102657

Aesthetic engagement is a skillset like any other and if you don't use it, it gets flabby.

But it can be revived with practice.

It's almost impossible to make a living as a regular critic. It's just possible to eke out a living mass-producing ideological "takes" on art, so that's what we get.

You can't make a living as an ideologically sophisticated critic, either. There is almost no market for in-depth discussions of art as art--even though a political lens.