Poptimism and the eternal High-Low problem

See, I will read your newsletter posts, if you don't use Substack! I found this one by W. David Marx to be thought provoking, though I don't agree with all of it. I ended up feeling like breaking it down a little though, because I feel like aspects of the argument he makes are interesting/original enough.

Generally I'm pretty comfortable saying that narratives of cultural decline are basically reactionary. What works are mainstream, canonized, or what infrastructure there is to support artistic work, can be much less subjectively regarded and analyzed (and reconsidered and rewritten) over time. For me, I always care about infrastructure... It's hard not to because it's so obviously bad right now and always seems like the money and resources are all going to precisely the wrong things. If you read my blog you're basically aware of my position on this I think (lol).

Some people bemoan the loss of a centralized or mono- culture due to "the internet," streaming services, social atomization, whatever. But I think the culture that is discussed publicly now is more of a monoculture than ever (and the consolidation of cultural discussions on the same awful engagement-driven platforms where everyone is talking about Star Wars is a large factor in that). This monoculture is also extremely self-affirming, through incestuous references, crossovers, bonus scenes, lore, etc, and extremely self-satisfied. While the characters may reiterate the arguments you just saw on twitter about some social injustice or interpersonal faux-pas (categories that run increasingly close together as platforms are tuned for rage-bait and endless arguments), the celebration of conformity to format, professionalism, polish, etc. is its main message (subtextually, but also sometimes as text, particularly in Netflix originals).

So yes, there is basically little to no public expression of the social value of experimental or idiosyncratic art now, outside of the people (and I mean individuals-- even the "middle way" of podcasts or independent sites have almost completely abandoned actively looking for and presenting new work to their audiences, which is something I consider, predictably, also a problem). And anyone who has at least identified this as an issue of infrastructure, resources, analysis, and/or the current structure of the "mainstream" is someone I want to agree with, definitely more than the linear "doom" narratives, which I don't want to be true of course but also... they are just not true because of the interesting work I'm able to find, despite pretty much everything being set up to discourage looking for it.

Poptimism was kind of functionally like dumping zebra mussels into any watershed they're not native to. Of course the work that already had resources and networks of advertising behind it to artificially pump it into ubiquity for maximum profits would outcompete any other set of values or approach to working when we pretended that they were all "equal." It makes total sense to me now, but I think I needed that essay to clarify it so precisely. It is an idea that wipes out the relevance of all other values besides popularity, conformity to marketable expectations, or speculations on how well it'll sell... values that have almost no relevance to how I discuss the work across history and in the present that has value to me.

Similarly, the optimism that creativity and culture can be found "anywhere" is twisted to only reinforce the mainstream and mainstream values-- you can be the most visually interesting or incisive video essay about Andor, or make the funniest or most definitive posts about what's wrong with the MCU. Whatever, so long as it contributes to this economy of advertising, directed attention, and neglect or exclusion of alternatives rather than threatening to become its own thing. Emily (in Paris) always finds a simultaneously creative, praiseworthy and self-fulfilling way to do her job by posting, and basically every Netflix original romcom is resolved with some sort of perverse synthesis of romance and (re)productivity into some kind of small business or property owner solution that comes along with true love's kiss. Retch!

So I understand wanting to temper/reject/slam the lid down on these phenomena. And of course they move in almost perfect step with global neoliberalism seeing everything in terms of “market solutions” (resulting in brutal arts funding cuts and the privatization of education, etc etc), the consolidation of media epitomized by the extremely crap internet super-platforms the majority of these discussions take place on, and the general precaritization of lifestyles where you previously might be able to work a part time job, pay rent, live cheaply, and spend the rest of your time writing about culture or doing your own work. Hell, you might have even been able to have a job writing about culture.

The analysis of why these are the outcomes of poptimism make sense. However, I also don't really think the high-low divide actually "works" as a solution from our current vantage point. A major point of contention within the article for me is the assertion that works received as almost penetratingly "bad" by the culture which produced them, here Plan 9 from Outer Space but for me the works of infamous contemporary shit-tuers like Neil Breen or David DeCoteau also come to mind, are, well, simply bad, and efforts to articulate their effects, their intrigue for audiences even after they have been broadly panned is just ridiculous contrarianism. For me in their obvious strangeness and awkwardness these works have far more sensibility (and therefore are worthwhile/interesting!) than the latest hyper-designed and utterly mid pop nepo-baby debut-- I would define those as "simply bad."

The high and low divide in itself was a result of historical conditions not just about how art was analyzed and discussed but how it was made (ie, in the academy). Only in a moment of early erosion of the high-low divide, and with his work discovered by specifically-placed individuals could someone like Henry Darger, for example, have an afterlife of infiltrating the "high culture" contexts of art galleries and scholarship. I don't think these conditions can be straightforwardly reinstated, nor do I think a reinstated high culture would be able to pick out today, for example, George Kuchar, Gregg Araki, Flann O'Brien, kikiyama, Sonic Youth, Sarah Jacobson... on and on the list of figures whose work I find formative, experimental, mind-expanding, but who also had an ambivalent or difficult or nonexistent relationship with "official" mainstream or high culture as they worked.

The pandora's box of all-culture-made-elsewhere has been irreversibly opened, and also has changed the way we look back on history, and think of what might be missing from it. While of course resources and infrastructure will play a role in how people who care about culture are able to communicate this against the flood of work that is simply financed into ubiquity hailed by poptimists as "the will of the people," we also have to exercise our aesthetic vocabulary to express and make arguments for how what we can't foresee strikes us.

So this impasse feels kind of similar to my intuition that dismissing gen AI outputs as just "slop" isn't an effective critique. It's kind of a deliberate abstention from making an aesthetic claim, even a negative one, and demurrs from identifying the ways the same logic (of polish, of predictability, of satisfying the listener/viewer/player/prompter) has the same schmaltzy, trite, manipulative-feeling and boring outcomes in homegrown organic human-made pop culture as well. There's a lot of canonized high culture that I also find insufferable, cliche, bland as any Taylor Swift song, and many tastemakers in the echelons of high culture, like art galleries and literary publishing, which were plopped into the role more by money or family lineage than critical insight. Making these critiques, whether publicly or in my own head, is what informs my subsequent aesthetic values and work. Drawing a high v low or AI v human line can't do this for you.

Aesthetic value is a type of excessiveness, which contributes to how it comes across as dubious or suspect in a hyper-quantified cultural context. If we think of morality in the old-fashioned terms of the act that is always good and always repeatable, aesthetics is the place where this doesn't apply, where repetition is not necessarily good or necessary or good. What works is indeterminate, and the challenge of aesthetics is to make a case for it anyways. The avant-garde has been described as making the leap into a practice for an audience that you don't know whether or not it exists. I think this relates to the role of the critic as well-- you have to assemble the audiences that could be, and they won't look like any that have come before.