“But why is this important?”
When we encounter a fashion, a film or some other cultural artifact that the critical establishment has celebrated, it’s easy to not understand it.
Taste, after all, is unevenly distributed.
But you don’t have to like something to understand why someone else thought it was important.
To move the culture forward, we need to have the empathy to imagine what others are seeing, liking and talking about.
Once you get the joke, you don’t have to laugh at it, but it definitely makes it easier for you to tell the next one.