Unless we are willing to accept our artists as they are, the answer to the question, “Who speaks for America today?” will have to be: the advertising agencies. They are entirely capable of showing us our unparalleled prosperity and our almost classless society, and no one has ever accused them of not being affirmative. Where the artist is still trusted, he will not be looked to for assurance. Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.
From Flannery O’Connor’s essay “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” collected in Mystery and Manners.
Biblioklept 
This is not entirely right or fair to O’Connor, I have to say. It’d out of context and misleading. Not that I’m guarding her rep or anything, but I ‘ve read, studied, researched her and her work for almost thirty years, written about her extensively, and this is so glancing, so superficial it perpetuates a lot of half truths and bad stuff. Context is what is needed here, bro ;)
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I don’t exactly know what you’re addressing as unfair (there is no referent in your comment for both of the “this’s” that you use). Maybe you are concerned that readers will think O’Connor is lauding advertising, rather than condemning it? I think it’s fairly clear, even without some middling explainer like myself interfering, that she’s excoriating the notion that authors are to provide uplift, to somehow sanctify the (commercial) American fantasy of prosperity, equality, etc.
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