The Mind Games of Art and Entertainment

The Mind Games of Art and Entertainment goes where no book on art or entertainment has gone before. Beginning in some territory familiar to readers curious about its subject, it goes on to show how entertainment has come to dominate American life-and how the historic events of January 6, 2021 could not have occurred as they did without the Culture of Entertainment as their enfolding context.

Along the way, the book explores such topics as what makes something a work of art or entertainment; how art and entertainment affect us, to both good and bad ends; how entertainment ascended to dominate our culture through democracy, commerce, and technology; and how the Culture of Entertainment breeds a pernicious attitude of unseriousness that infects culture at large and perverts politics. We also see important roles played in this story by a wide array of characters, including Plato and Aristotle, Leo Tolstoy and Luigi Pirandello, Auguste Rodin and Andy Warhol, Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley, P. T. Barnum and Walt Disney, the Muppets of Sesame Street and Donald Trump.

Despite the range of its contents, the book focuses on, as the title says, the mind games of art and entertainment. We play those mind games whenever we experience art or entertainment. In that experience, mind games take us out of the real world to where anything can happen-especially in entertainment-and yet nothing that happens there seems to have serious consequences. But that experience and its mind games can nonetheless have effects on us that we take back into the real world for good or ill-such as the very attitude of unseriousness.

In all, The Mind Games of Art and Entertainment is a short book combining theory and history, psychology and politics, social observation and cultural criticism. And it is itself rather entertaining-in the best way.