Decanonizing high art does not require abandoning critical evaluation of popular art

Evidence

His aesthetic position was always premised on the notion that deconstructing the claims of high art to monopolize aesthetic value does not in any way involve uncritically celebrating all aspects of popular art. For Stuart, the argument about any particular cultural form still has to be evaluative, and the value of any particular manifestation of popular art has to be established by close critical attention. As he scathingly remarks, the kind of “flat populism” that came to prevail in some sections of Cultural Studies (as in the critiques made by Simon Frith and Jon Savage) is no use at all in this endeavor. For him, it remained crucial to be able to make distinctions of value that would enable us to identify (in the example he chooses) precisely why Billie Holiday is far better than other popular singers: because, he explains, her voice can be argued to find a form of expression for a complex range of feelings and experiences toward which others can only gesture. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 60

Categorization

• SEED: An essay/angle: ‘flat populism’ as a failure mode of cultural criticism — critique without standards collapses into the very romanticization Hall rejected. This is a sharp takedown worth unpacking.
• CANDY: The Billie Holiday example is an immediately graspable, memorable way to state the position — evaluative criticism still matters after you stop canonizing.