I'm afraid I can't read everything the 2 Blowhards produce. But this definitely struck a chord, on the subject of fantasy in art. Friedrich Blowhard had just been with his pre-teen daughter to see a film aimed at the pre-teen market, because the events in it were (presumably) the stuff of pre-teen fantasy. Friedrich was knee-jerk scornful, but then thought about it a bit more:

But as I was leaving the theater, and starting to smugly dismiss this as merely a piece of commercial wish-fulfillment, I suddenly had a disabling thought: is it really fair to dismiss any movie - or any work of art - for being nothing but an unrealistic fantasy? What is it supposed to be - a realistic fantasy? To the extent that one’s emotions are involved, don’t elements of fantasy, of projection and of sympathy invade the act of watching even a surveillance camera tape?

Granted, I suppose it is possible to dismiss a film or a work of art for the sin of being somebody else’s fantasy - presumably, somebody who is a lot less cool, mature and worldly than you - but this judgment seems to me to include a great dollop of hypocrisy, not to speak of arrogance. I suppose it would be possible to dismiss a work of art as an incompetent presentation of somebody else’s fantasy, but if it’s not your fantasy, how would you know how well it was executed? So I guess that leaves us with one final case--the offending work of art is an incompetent presentation of your fantasy - which is, oddly, never the way people present such a critique. No, such critiques - usually delivered by people with very strong superegos - tend to focus on the insufficiently reality of the artwork.

I’ve never known what to make of this criticism, exactly. I mean, if reality is what one is after, why consume art at all? It seems to me that deliberately suspending reality, oiling away its frustrating, friction-filled bits, is one of the great pleasures of art, perhaps its central pleasure. (I will grant that it is often gratifying, somehow, if this contravention of reality is kept highly specific and concrete, while permitting the normal laws of reality to run undisturbed through the rest of the work. But focusing too closely on this secondary pleasure - what one might call the journalistic aspect of a work of art - is to overlook the real joy that the crucial, central violation of reality gives us.)

I would have lost the brackets from that last bit. Otherwise, hear hear.

And I also liked this comment on the above from David Mercer:

You just nailed on the head why I can't stand 'literary fiction': what's the point, there is no suspension of disbelief, it's all re-hashing the real world.

There are other reasons why I don't like modern literary fiction, but that is definitely part of it.