I could also say, it’s one of my favourite platitudes, I am the unanointed chronicler of a period in which high culture has permanently disappeared. There are still such old folk – myself included – teetering in the queue, paying no heed to their age, ridiculously shaking their medically prescribed walking sticks in the air, furiously wailing that there was such a thing as high culture once, but the bystanders don’t bat an eyelid, they don’t even understand what this man is croaking on about, why he’s holding up the queue in the pharmacy, or at the till in Tesco. The point isn’t that high culture is losing, or is in danger, but that we’ve arrived in a new era, when an area of culture that can’t be infected by the market, or is unable to adapt to its laws, and thus rendered useless, is simply wiped off the map, and all that remains in its place is what we once called mass culture, and we now call culture. That’s what can be found now in the last pages/minutes of the media, where it states which will be the bestseller, or which will catch the attention of those wanting to be entertained. To cut to the chase: today there’s nothing to compare to, to have to say mass culture. Nothing else exists. Homer is a comic, Shakespeare is a so-called difficult question in an idiotic television quiz, and Bach in a board game.

Krasznahorkai, interviewed