Traffic-driven poptimism replaced critics’ role of teaching taste

Evidence

Rival publications had already gone full poptimist long before. As cultural historian Saul Austerlitz noted in 2014, The New Yorker praised Britney Spears’s comeback album, and Slate’s annual Music Club devoted most of its essays to Billboard Hot 100 artists. “Obsessive coverage of stars like Drake and Justin Bieber,” Austerlitz explained, “drives Web traffic in a way that more judicious, varied coverage of the likes of, say, the Tuareg guitar wizard Bombino generally cannot.” Critics once understood their role as teaching young devotees about good taste, but this no longer made sense when no one wanted to be a pupil. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 528

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Marx’s ‘death of the sellout’ mechanism — economic incentives shifting what criticism rewards. — connects to: Industry-trained taste becomes involuntary habit mistaken for natural spontaneity; Serious pop criticism contested common sense while popism ratifies consumerism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1212; Omnivore poptimism replaced critical taste with permissive eclecticism. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 744 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how traffic metrics replaced aesthetic judgment as the organizing principle of cultural coverage — the Bombino vs. Bieber asymmetry as the defining data point.