I’ve forgotten this sometimes but being able to discover something you like, curate it, and make time to enjoy it *is* intelligence, connecting with art is intelligence, empathy is intelligence, the way of the dullard is to find nothing meaningful in art except for a way to seem snidely clever

It goes into that weird thing that genuine appreciation is somehow considered less intellectual than criticism but everybody is getting trained to be such a cynical unfeeling asshole nowadays that I find the smartest people often are the “hell yeah cool song/drawing/story/video” people