Sublime

“I have a fascination with Andy Warhol and the way he wanted to make commercial art that was taken as seriously as fine art. Music has gotten so pretentious that now it’s almost rebellious to be a pop artist.

“Pop culture doesn’t really change the world,” the labor organizer Teo Bugbee wrote for SSENSE that summer. “It’s a product to be consumed, an indulgence. But the gift of pop is that it actualizes a fantasy: visions of a world that doesn’t yet and maybe won’t ever exist.”

What journalist W. David Marx calls “savvy consumers,” those desiring cool and convention-breaking pop culture, are still consumers. When the names of products or celebrities appear in a book, they prick us like a targeted ad, jumping from the page as digestible morsels. Reference novels work because of globalized digitization; the danger in them