Because when art gets made to check a box for positive representation, you feel it—you feel its intellectual limits, its political lassitude, its flat affect where a complex emotional life is supposed to be. “Representation matters”–type art is interested in people the same way Didion is interested in people, which is to say, not at all. People—the spiky, uneven feeling, striated with joy and boredom and grief and wonder, of being a living person in the world—don’t
