Taste and standards do matter.
What is it about grievance? It is, among emotional states, the one we profess to want the least, a gorge-drop into outright failure. Once you’re aggrieved, you’re wronged, and the battle back to a state of rightness is one we all, if pressed, would rather avoid. Isn’t it better to feel, at least, you’ve been treated with fairness? Yet the age of grievance barrels on. In politics, in business, in the arts, the titans and would-be titans want you to know they aren’t truly on top, that truer power structures, both visible and unseen, are constraining them, unfairly so. Grievance is never in short supply. And in this culture, the victorious must feel this way. Why? Perhaps because total victory isn’t enough. The critical infrastructure of the twentieth century has been mostly eviscerated. Conglomerates, algorithms and cynical marketing campaigns determine, for the most part, what cultural artifacts the public consumes, whether they be the working-class or the left-liberal professional class. Most news organizations, long ago, laid off their full-time book, film, and art critics. The blog culture that briefly served as a tastemaker for the 2000s music scene, with Pitchfork reigning as hegemon, is long gone. Social media has ensured fan bases are ever ready to eviscerate the lonely critic with a limited following who attempts to critique their favored artist or intellectual property. Poptimism—the belief that pop music and pop artifacts in general are worthy of intellectual engagement and interest—evolved from the reasonable view that the films, TV shows, and music that reach a mass audience can also have great merit to the view that they must have great merit, and to imply otherwise makes you an embittered dissident, virtually without value.
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