Popism’s levelling of culture turned into a nihilism that debases high art

Evidence

The once-challenging claim that for certain listeners, the (likes of) Backstreet Boys could have been as potent as (the likes of) Nirvana has been passive-nihilistically reversed — now, the message disseminated by the wider culture — if not necessarily by the popists themselves — is that nothing was ever better than the Backstreet Boys. The old high culture disdain for pop cultural objects is retained; what is destroyed is the notion that there is anything more valuable than those objects. If pop is no more than a question of hedonic stim, then so are Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky. Reading Milton, or listening to Joy Division, have been re-branded as just another consumer choice, of no more significance than which brand of sweets you happen to like. … But their project was the exact inverse of this: their claim was that as much sophistication, intelligence and affect could be found in the pop song as anywhere else. Importantly, the music, and the popular culture of the time, made the argument for them. The evaluation was not some fitsall-eras a priori position, but an intervention at a particular time designed to have certain effects. Morley and Penman were still critics, who expected to influence production, not consumer guides marking commodities out of five stars, or executives spending their spare time ranking every song with the word “sugar” in it on live journal communities that are the cyberspace equivalent of public school dorms. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1211

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names and defines his coinage ‘Deflationary Hedonic Relativism’ as the inverted successor to popism.
• XREF: connects to: Poptimism’s leveling of art and commerce destroyed art’s autonomy — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 844; Capitalist commodification displaces the aesthetic value of art — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 69; Postmodernism erases the high culture versus mass culture boundary. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 38 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Poptimism’s leveling of art and commerce destroyed art’s autonomy #corroborates (0.92) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 844
• Postmodernism represents the plebeianization of modernist culture #corroborates (0.85) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 271
• Postmodernism erases the high culture versus mass culture boundary. #corroborates (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 38
• Capitalist commodification displaces the aesthetic value of art #corroborates (0.80) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 69