--- Bernard Welt on popular art, in Mythomania, Art Issues Press, 1998, p 7-8
In context:
Maybe it is part of a general change in American culture that has been welcomed and deplored as a new age of faith, a giddy plunge into the irrational that runs across lines of party and sect, embracing the politics of compassion as well as stern but fuzzy family values, and New Age spirituality along with new-fashioned fundamentalism. It remains to be seen whether this is not an age of bad faith. But I know two things: First, it is happening because it makes someone money, and will continuing happening until it stops making someone money. (Christian evangelism didn't find television as a way of spreading its message; television found evangelism as a way of extending its market.) Second, it has something to do with the hypnotic trance we fell into around the time of Ronald Reagan's first televised address to the nation, when it first occurred to us that we had actually begun living in a movie. Raging neoconservatives or raving multiculturalists, we are still haunted by the Great White Father, and like it or not, we remain in the Age of Reagan until we are freed by the next great paradigm shift.
