Libtards are so used to the last decade of academia-media under occupation by the state party ideology, where the only thing you had to do to remove a dissident was identify their inallegiance to the party line (“problematic”), and the only assessment of work came from exclusively positivd criticism merged indistinguishably from agent PR, they’ve completely atrophied any ability to appraise and communicate on work on its own merits, to read art for itself, only analyzing allegiance signaling and expressing status positioning—which leaves the outsider, anti-institutional avamt garde where real art lives entirely illegible to them. As merely identifying dissent fails to land, the only other thing they’re able to do is make vague implications of the work being “boring”, “done before”, etc. hoping smugly alluding indirectly to some kind of unsophistication will trick the audience into a consensus against it. All you have to do is simply challenge them to actually detail the work being critiqued, and they will reveal not only have they not read it, but are incapably of even describing it, let alone critiquing it; actual work existing outside party deferences is ILLEGIBLE, these people can’t read; they are entirely only working backwards from the original point: you breached deference to the party ideology. Try as hard as you want, I always ask them to just “describe what you’re critiquing” and they will always refuse entirely, and severely embarrass themselves when they dare do it. They’ve spent a decade only learning to read work in the context of party ideology and social status signaling, actually engaging art on conceptual, theoretical and historical basis is lost knowledge; as the only living art today exists outside the institutional art world, art itself is illegible to them. But the existence of a monolithic party ideology pushed by the state in union with centralized media and academia is over, media has decentralized out of their control and the state got semi-invaded by populists, and China is rising, we live in multipolarity— you have to crawl out of the cave and learn to read the real world again.