The poptimist era inverted the avant-garde axiom that mass appeal signals artistic compromise

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

• XREF: Anticipates the later ‘death of the sellout’ mechanism Marx builds toward; connects to the reader’s central thesis about cultural flattening. — connects to: Pop and vernacular culture prefigure avant-garde ideas more powerfully than high theory does — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 384
• QUESTION: Is Sanneh’s dismissal fair to Pitchfork-era acts, and does this value inversion actually persist or was it short-lived?