Renata Adler

“Here’s what I think is wrong with boring people to no purpose. It’s not just that it corrupts their attention, makes them less capable, in other words, of being patient with important things that require a tolerance, to some greater purpose, of some boring time. The real danger lies, I think, in this: that boredom has intimately to do with power. One has only to think of hypnosis, of being mesmerized. Monotony, as a literal method of enthrallment. So this claim to find art in boredom, for its own sake or as one of the modes of alienation, is not simply a harmless misunderstanding, which finds it avant garde to stupefy. Deliberate, pointless boredom is a kind of menace, and a disturbing exercise of power.”

- Renata Adler from Pitch Dark