The author is right in one thing, which is the great thing about (some/a lot of) art is not just empathizing. However, giving the ability to empathize implies t

The author is right in one thing, which is the great thing about (some/a lot of) art is not just empathizing. However, giving the ability to empathize implies the true merit of such art, which is a record of the experience of a person, presented in such a way where you are able to look at yourself as that person--to find a common ancestor node and see a path from that node to the person presented through art. From such a record, you increase the different perspectives from which one may base their "representative thinking", as mentioned in the article. The irony of lambasting art which provokes empathy while promoting representative thinking, is that it is exactly representative thinking with a limited set of viewpoints which literature (and art in general) which provokes empathy for people from different points of view attempts to cure. If you try to put yourself in the place of another (which is different from immersion, in which you lose the connection to your sense of self, which is a distinction I think the author fails in not making), without the knowledge of their experiences, this ends in a total failure of understanding, and at a society-wide scale can lead (and has led) to destructive misperceptions. So to think this way without relying on resources which provoke empathy and force you to broaden your sense of self (meaning broadening the viewpoints which you are able to place yourself in) is actually very bad. What is interesting about the book that the author mentions in the final section is not that it attempts to disassociate the reader and stop any kind of feeling of empathy, it's that it attempts to force you to consider what you've just felt. So it's a feature on top, or used in conjunction with empathy, not in spite of it. "What would this model of art as “representative thinking” entail? Well, for one thing, literally more representation. One can only bring the experiences of others to mind if they are made imaginatively available to us. Perhaps, instead of the current distribution—portrayals of “default humans” (that is, straight white men, good and evil) vs. empathy vehicles (that is, everybody else)—we could simply have greater variety of experience represented in our art." Ultimately the author seems to have some misunderstanding of the idea of empathy or at least empathy in art, especially if they think that no straight white male has even been portrayed in art in such a way to provoke empathy, and if they think that art in general is lacking in diverse representation.