Poptimism reframed manufactured pop as worthy of serious appreciation

Evidence

Sanneh countered that pop music—and by obvious extension, the entirety of pop culture—shouldn’t be dismissed as kitsch nor as bad art but appreciated as a complex manufactured product. In this, poptimism not only acknowledged postmodernist trends in culture but also paid them full fealty. Echoing Fredric Jameson’s idea that “postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process,” Sanneh implored us to enjoy pop music as a “glorious, incoherent, corporate-financed, audience-tested mess.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 118

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines poptimism as the explicit rejection of art/kitsch hierarchies in favor of appreciating pop as a manufactured product.
• SEED: Angle: poptimism as the intellectual precondition for Marx’s omnivore monoculture — once no taste is better than another, nothing can signal.
• XREF: connects to: Serious pop criticism contested common sense while popism ratifies consumerism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1212