Poptimism inverted avant-garde values by treating small audiences as failure

Evidence

In the poptimist logic, however, Pitchfork’s favorite musical acts were simply lesser artists for refusing to pursue mass appeal. At Pitchfork’s first Chicago festival in 2005, Kelefa Sanneh dismissed the lineup for that very reason: “The two stages at Union Park weren’t filled with bands that seemed destined to blast into the stratosphere, or even the troposphere. Instead, the stages were filled with bands that are already about as popular as they will ever be.” Previous generations of avant-garde artists saw alienating mass audiences as either a requirement or an unavoidable consequence of pushing art forward. But in the poptimist value system, experimental artists were nobodies until they found large audiences. Not selling a lot of records—or worse, not even trying to—became grounds for critical dismissal. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 123

Categorization

• SEED: The inversion of the avant-garde mandate — from ‘alienating audiences proves progress’ to ‘no audience means failure’ — is a sharp essay angle on how modern criticism flipped century-old artistic values.
• XREF: connects to: Artistic success is a reified reflection of the money audiences pay — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 424; Pop and vernacular culture prefigure avant-garde ideas more powerfully than high theory does — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 384