This argument for an ecosystemic apprehension of cultural production, and a concomitant call for a new modality for cultural criticism, has been sat among my (RAM-sappingly vast) array of open tabs for a couple of weeks now, and I keep returning to it in amazement and envy.
(It’s the third of three pieces, though—as noted below—it’s written in such a way that you don’t need to have read the first and the second to grasp the conclusions of the third. If you find yourself vibing with the third, go back and read the others for thickening. If not, uh, don’t?)
Amazement, because it’s so incredibly succinct—and that’s due to a sort of functional writing style which seems ripped from the pages of a law textbook, and thus a deeply weird and ugly way of writing about culture, but nonetheless a devastatingly effective way, too. I kinda hate that something so complex and qualitative might be communicated so concisely, in a format that only a mathematician could love.
3.4 The overall effect of poptimism on the cultural ecosystem has been to: (1) make market reception, not innovation, the key attribute of good art, (2) focus audience attention on mainstream releases regardless of the innovation contained within, (3) shift the cultural discourse to explaining the popularity of already popular artists, and (4) provide further esteem to popular artists for being popular.
3.4.1 Poptimism, in other words, reported on culture as if it were sports: the greatest, most historical feats only happen in the “major leagues,” and so everything in the “minor leagues” is trivial by nature and less worthy of attention.
3.4.2 This approach perfectly conforms to market logic, but denies the inherent nature of cultural creativity. The “minor leagues” of marginalized and smaller cultural sub-units have always been the primary source of innovations that go on to refresh the entire system.
3.4.3 Poptimism was also self-defeating in that critical appraisal and explanation have never been necessary for mainstream audiences to enjoy mainstream culture.
Envy, because that’s how I always feel when someone makes an argument that seems intuitively obvious to me, while also seeming incredibly fresh. Envy, because how can this be the first time someone has summed up the searingly obvious shortcomings of poptimism1 in a few numbered paragraphs?
Envy, because why didn’t I write this first?
If you wanted to go even further, and to reach into a more continental way of talking about the same phenomena—which, on the basis of the style, I’m guessing this author does not—you could say that poptimism can be read as the embracing approach to hyperreality, in the Baudrillardean sense of that concept: popular forms are popular not for their innate qualities, but rather for their popularity. Surface over substance.
By way of forestalling the obvious rejoinders, neither I nor the author of the linked piece are saying that pop is bad or unnecessary. Rather, we are both arguing that pop values have been over-lauded at the expense of subcultural values for a long time.
That said, the absence of (infra)structural factors from this argument is a weakness. Poptimism might be seen as a function of the capture of culture by capital, rather than its enabler: the ideological imperative of a prevailing media ecology.
- I mean, crusading for decades against one -ism, only to replace it wholesale with another -ism that merely inverts its premises; who could have possibly foreseen &c &c &c. ↩︎
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