The problem is that audiences are not so easily fooled, because they have internalized the entirety of artistic progress in the 20th century. They know when a song is just a jam and not a radical piece of transformative art. But in working to find intellectual content, even where there is none, critics were able to justify their placement of... See more

Last year Sinéad O’Sullivan had a great piece in The New Yorker arguing that no one bothers to argue that Taylor Swift’s songs are musically innovative. But since her music connects with so many people, it must be good, and therefore, critics are on a mission to find the innovation somewhere . For Kornhaber, Swift has been “pioneering a futuristic... See more

Not every creative endeavor provides the same degree of originality or formalistic mastery. A child's finger-painting is not equivalent to a Rothko. A work only verges towards art in challenging or playing with the existing conventions to create new aesthetic effects. Entertainment is a different kind of creative endeavor. It doesn't need to tinker... See more

But this obviously contributed to a feeling of decline in the long-run, because mass culture continued to do the thing it always does: avoid artistic innovation in order to maximize profit. But once poptimism established that only the mainstream "mattered," it set up audiences to judge the health of culture on its least artistic output. If we have... See more

In the 20th century, most elites believed that "art" described a rarified sphere of complicated symbolic activity, which stood in opposition to the "mass culture" of bland, sensationalist, lowest-common-denominator works made for profit. There was no confusing the two worlds, because there was a very high bar for what qualified as "art." The... See more

Prior to Spotify and Steve Bannon, the collective thinking on pop culture underwent a radical transformation. A new critical consensus demanded that we stop thinking about creativity in a hierarchical way: there was no "high" culture and "low" culture — just culture.

This ideology has become known as "poptimism," although I understand that most... See more

The only way to define "progress" in culture is to draw clear lines between entertainment and art, something that has become extremely unpopular. This, however, is not just a rhetorical flaw in the argumentation about decline — but a core reason for the decline itself.

Critics instead spent their time and word-counts thinking about culture with artistic intentions, which raised the profile of these artworks to define the era (despite being unpopular in terms of raw audience numbers). This resulted in culture feeling healthy as long as a few inventive artists were still doing good work.