Omnivore poptimism replaced critical taste with permissive eclecticism.

Evidence

Rockism lost, and poptimism won. All cultural snootiness is now tedious. The digital publication The Pudding trained an AI on “a corpus of over two million indicators of objectively good music, including Pitchfork reviews, record store recommendations, and subreddits you’ve never heard of” to judge “How bad is your Spotify?” The entire point was not to help you find better music but to poke fun at the mechanical counterimitations inherent in indie snobbery. The zeitgeist proclaims: “Let people enjoy things.” — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 744

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Rejecting taste weakens cultural capital and elevates raw wealth as status. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 775; Authenticity functions as an exclusions tool guarding cultural production — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 273; Eclecticism of contemporary culture signals a general slackening of taste — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 486 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Eclecticism of contemporary culture signals a general slackening of taste #expands (0.90) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 486
• Traffic-driven poptimism replaced critics’ role of teaching taste #corroborates (0.90) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 528
• Omnivore taste flattens the past into an accessory and prevents new culture from emerging #expands (0.85) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 387
• Serious pop criticism contested common sense while popism ratifies consumerism #corroborates (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1212
• Under the culture industry the concept of taste has become obsolete. #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 68