Our explanatory culture …

… The American Scholar: Too Much Information - Paula Marantz Cohen.

The other day, a colleague came into my office disgusted. He had asked his students to write a paragraph about the symbolism of the flower pot in Raymond Carver’s story “Popular Mechanics.” The answers that came back were similar, he said, not because students had copied from each other, but because they had all Googled “Popular Mechnics,” “Carver,” “flower pot,” and “symbolism,” scanned what came up, and found the “answer.” They had no idea that this wasn’t the way to proceed. They figured that the question had a singular answer, much in the way a math problem has an answer.

I detest those audio tapes they give out at museum exhibitions. Why the hell do they think it's called visual art?