The Best of Science Fiction 12

Take a word: content. Take it away — it's out. Take another: hypnoprone. It's mine and you can have it.

The great Media audience has reason to worry about content. (You too can be hypnoprone. When you no longer 'hear' the commercials, and you start singing-along with any lyric provided the beat is right, you better start hoping there's no content.) The latest thing is the sing-along (with Marsh McLuhan) school of criticism, which has compounded the ready-made artist/artisan and consumer/creator confusions, with a message/sermon mixup. Add a dash of camp; up pops Susan Sontag, who — actually — worries that 'the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content' will 'violate art' or make it 'into an article of use'

This Pop Preachment on null-content (anti-matter?) is described in the Report from Iron Mountain (Dial, 1967):

... Art would be reassigned the role it once played in a few primitive peace-oriented social systems. This was the function of pure decoration, entertainment, or play, entirely free of the burden of expressing the sociomoral values and conflicts of a war-oriented society. It is interesting that the groundwork for such a value-free aesthetic is already being laid today, in growing experimentation in art without conflict. A cult has developed around a new kind of cultural determinism, which proposes that the technological form of a cultural expression determines its values rather than does its ostensibly meaningful content. Its clear implication is that there is no 'good' or 'bad' art, only that which is appropriate to its (technological) times and that which is not.