Some imp in me makes me want to react churlishly to this thread for some reason but I basically agree that artists "should" observe and reflect the time they live in
But also that the artist should react AGAINST the times in some ways
Think (to use a thoroughly contemporary example) of "Ulysses" -- incorporating the media of the day, capturing the increasingly fractured consciousness, the influence of advertising on the mind and so on. But at the same time standing as a sort of rebuke or antidote to the chaotic vulgarity it reflected. A huge perversely hard book to read in an age where mass consciousness was already becoming too fractured to cope with such books... Let alone where things stand in 2024.
Similarly, it's important perhaps to know about social media and VR and AI and so on but this is all at best ambivalent stuff, and you see all these counter-movements to it, attempts to wrestle free from the matrix.
Yeah, this is the balancing act Luke and I were talking about. How to be both inside and outside.
I suppose in one sense you can't be anything but as whatever you write will be a response to the world around you, whether you're leaning in or attempting to escape from it. It's there whatever you do.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end. Someone like Joyce is someone very much with their eyes open and working with the world around them though.
But also that the artist should react AGAINST the times in some ways
"Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments . . . I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us. You know, in America and in western Europe we live in very wealthy democracies, we can do virtually anything we want, I'm able to write whatever I want to write. But I can't be part of this culture of simulation, in the sense of the culture's absorbing of everything . . . "