“As a nation, the United States is a fiction stands on three legs: a set of still contested eighteenth century political documents; the cautionary example of the Civil War; and the daily consumption of mass culture. That’s it. Everything else, however tremendous, is secondary. Tripods are precarious, as I’m reminded whenever I encounter intimidatingly foursquare foreigners–all these knitted residues of race, land, religion, and language.  The rest of the world deems Americans superficial, and that is correct. What the rest of the world may not grasp is that we are profoundly superficial. The supple, adhesive, masking surfaces that are maintained by our culture industries around the clock let us pass for a people.”

–Peter Schjeldhal, “American Pie: The Whitney’s Empty Blockbuster,” The New Yorker, May 17, 1999.