Why are there far fewer advocates for popism/poptimism related to art forms OTHER than music?

As for literature, you'll see a ton of words defending YA and genre literature, but mainly defending it qua literature ('GoT is serious literature too, here's why ...') - doesn't sound like true poptimism to me.

what would a poptimist defense of it sound like?

read what makes you feel good, mayne

i haven't read it, but that series seems to be designed to make the readers feel terrible! the conversations I hear are like, "did you get to that part yet?" "oh my god, that part was the worst! I can't believe that happened!"

and the new yorker piece about the YA author is about a book where the main character is dying of some terminal illness. maybe poptimism is incompatible with YA because YA is about making you feel bad.

Popist defense of GoT would be along the lines of: the plot kept me reading it, I got angry when people I liked died and punched the air when people I liked got their own back; I like entering the world of the book, and everything in the story that could be called ridiculous, I find thrilling and exciting

Same with Twilight and Harry Potter more or less

If you had a GoT fan saying GoT was better than 50 Shades of Grey because it was serious and literary, and the 50 Shades fan responded by saying they just got off on 50 Shades, that might map on to rockism vs popism? Both people are talking about mass market products, but one of them wants to elevate one product above others, whereas the other just enjoys the product for itself without caring about its status.

Don't think either of those books would appeal to a a rockist. Seems like "rockist" literature would have to somehow feel (to the litist) like the natural state of the form, the bedrock from which all subsequent diversions are just novelty or temporary experimentation, a real book as opposed to an ebook or whatever, apparently timeless and classic, authentically created as an artistic expression and not specifically created for an existing market. Steinbeck maybe, or Kerouac?

its maybe a more interesting question with visual arts. we don't have the same low/high divide there because there aren't really even low visual arts, or to the extent they develop, like graffiti, they're adopted incredibly rapidly by the art world. so arguably the 'challenge' to the low-high divide (challenge in quotes because you can't just keep challenging it forever like its a thing) in the art world for the past 50 years (70? 80?) has been probably the defining narrative.

on the lit side, there is actual genre lit that gets written out of the 'real' lit story even as there's been a place made for westerns long ago and sci-fi more recently and YA today (sorta): http://www.gorillaconvict.com/2011/10/vickie-stringer-keeping-it-real-3/

there aren't really even low visual arts

jack vettriano

There are a lot of very well-read people who will rep for mass market fiction, even when the fiction in question isn't particularly well-written. Usually it's based on enjoying it for what it is rather than criticising it for what it isn't (and usually isn't trying to be).

Garden variety comments box rockism usually looks ridiculous when you invite the poster to compare Mozart or Beethoven or Shostakovich to whatever band they're holding up as an objectively superior to modern pop music (usually the Stones), usually because they miss the point that both are pop and both are trash. And they're either both "art" or neither of them are.

There's still a big (albeit shrinking) contingent in the world of classical/notated music that looks down on all pop whether it's Beyonce or Led Zeppelin or "art-rock" and where these barriers still firmly exist with very few pop performers allowed over the line, but that debate happens even there.

Variations of this debate also appear to exist in dance, film, architecture and visual art from what I can see. I suspect they're only really absent in areas without proper rockism but my ignorance is betraying me here - I've no idea if rockism and popism exists in the world of, say, topiary.

Was going to mention Manny Farber too, although not so much that essay, more his example throughout Negative Space. You see the reviews of B&W b-films (actually I haven't seen enough of those) and then he ends w/Fassbinder and Structuralist cinema.

But beyond that, its something more ingrained in in film culture and the way cinema worked. Lotsa auteurs never forgot -- while shooting in beautiful colours and framing the image -- that it was all to show that people's faces (and women if you were male) were beautiful. Yes you add more but its not something that is forgotten about.

Although now we are all well into a separation.

Don't really like the way the question is phrased. I don't think it needed poptmism to come along -- insofar as it is a thing at all and I'm not sure on that -- for people to have a problem w/ guilty pleasures.

I mean really the question should be turned inside out - the question is the extent to which other art forms erect objective (or more often pseudo-objective) measures of quality. You need that to happen first before popism can exist.

garden gnomes still prohibited from display at the chelsea flower show iirc

^pleasingly gnomic interjection from nickb

Gnome Chomsky over here weighing in

Both people are talking about mass market products, but one of them wants to elevate one product above others, whereas the other just enjoys the product for itself without caring about its status.

imo there are regular large-scale-hits that people can treat as *real books* (eg The Corrections, maybe Gone Girl more recently, David Nicholls even, David Mitchell… it's not an especially coherent list).

I don't think it maps especially well to a "Jake Bugg – *real music*" (haha though ok, I like particular forms of psychological and domestic realism as equivalent to 'plays a real instrument'), just because the histories, borderlines, means of transmission, cultural positions are so different.

, a real book as opposed to an ebook or whatever, apparently timeless and classic, authentically created as an artistic expression and not specifically created for an existing market. Steinbeck maybe, or Kerouac?

I'd see someone like Roth in a Dylan/Stones-ish role of 'The Real'.

oh shit david mitchell is radiohead

& i think an active(*) poptimism of books would/does look like what I've seen of the fandoms – participatory, creative, partisan about characters, etc etc. But as ppl have said upthread it doesn't really occupy the same space as the self-conscious literary world, they just don't rub up against one another enough to generate friction/a theorised debate.

(one cause of that I suppose is that you'd rarely accidentally read The Hunger Games whereas – particularly in youth/20s – you just hear an awful lot of stuff everywhere. Also see times - hours vs minutes to consume book vs pop song)

(*) as opposed to just really enjoying eg urban fantasy

hey just don't rub up against one another enough to generate friction/a theorised debate.

Janeites might be a flashpoint.

There's still a big (albeit shrinking) contingent in the world of classical/notated music that looks down on all pop whether it's Beyonce or Led Zeppelin or "art-rock"

yeah thinking of the kind of fusty Private Eye mentality where all one has to do to get themselves into Pseud's Corner is equate any sort of non-classical/jazz music with established notions of Art

As for literature, you'll see a ton of words defending YA and genre literature, but mainly defending it qua literature ('GoT is serious literature too, here's why ...') - doesn't sound like true poptimism to me.

disagree here -- I think lots of YA-crit is more along the lines of "I enjoy this stuff, I laughed, I cried, so do lots of other people, the virtues Roberto Bolano has are not the only virtues books can have and aspire to" which seems pretty close to poptimist to me.

I realised the other day that I'm a poptimist with music but basically a rockist snob when it comes to TV and novels and I'm not sure why.

So how do we interpret this quote from Kingsley Amis, talking about John D. MacDonald, writer of the "Travis McGee" series of crime thrillers:

MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?

He seems to be stopping short of calling it serious literature, but perhaps is saying that where the author directs the reader's attention - or the stance of the author toward the subject matter - can disguise the craftsmanship of the writing.

Genre writers do get posthumously co-opted by literary types though - Jim Thompson springs to mind, I dunno how highly rated Chandler was when he was alive, etc.

X-post addendum: But he's also judging MacDonald's approach superior, so he's trying to rearrange accepted literary values to some extent

To Matt's point: In my example, Amis wasn't speaking of MacDonald posthumously - it was in 1971, in the thick of MacDonald's career

Wouldn't be surprised if Amis was saying that partly to wide up his son, a well-known Bellow stan.

WIND up

Jim Thompson and Philip K. Dick too - but you know, lotsa film adaptations help.

More from Kingsley Amis:

I think it’s very important to read widely and in a wide spectrum of merit and ambition on the part of the writer. And ever since, I’ve always been interested in these less respectable forms of writing—the adventure story, the thriller, science fiction, and so on—and this is why I’ve produced one or two examples myself. I read somewhere recently somebody saying, “When I want to read a book, I write one.” I think that’s very good. It puts its finger on it, because there are never enough books of the kind one likes: one adds to the stock for one’s own entertainment.

Amis wrote a James Bond novel in the late 1960s, lest we forget

Well again, I think his love of genre fiction fed into his dislike for the experimental, and his increasing sense of himself as a cultural and political conservate. He didn't much like it when ppl like Aldiss and Ballard moved in a more avant-garde direction.

Chandler's reputation was pretty strong during his lifetime iirc - I think he was pretty quickly perceived as having literary weight.

Amis (and Larkin and a few others of that generation, The Movement generally really) are slightly unusual cases because I think it's a major pre-60s culture war – like from early on it's a combination of taking pleasure in jazz or SF or erle stanley gardner or what have you, along with a self-conscious opposition to Oxford/establishment/Eng Lit high culture – it hardens into a slightly trolly antagonism to most modern literature over time.

It comes up a bit here as we fall into Dick Francis chat:

beckett's reading list

vague idea that the crude large scale process for genre moving to something like literary respectability is basically a slow generational/class movement – as readers who grew up on the stuff (which I think tends to be a class marker, ie they're not-quite-establishment) move towards hegemonic middle age/cultural authority, they make a case for the genre fic that they regard affectionately, which then becomes a kind of alternative establishment or gains some liminal 'respectability', leading to cross-bleed, greater respectability etc. (Not very satisfied with it as an explanation though – why hasn't horror made this sort of transition, when crime and then SF have?)

Lovecraft and Stephen King have, apparently

Books have also been around far, far longer than recorded music. So there's been more time to break down book hierarchy. Recorded music is also perhaps the most recent of any technological media, so it lends itself far easier to postmodern criticism.

xp
yeah, there are definitely a few exceptions, but I'd say there isn't a well-populated or stable border region, as there is with crime, SF & thrillers. Maybe it's a timing thing – a Clive Barker/Frank Herbert raised generation of serious literary writers could be due.

otoh elements of older horror were certainly incorporated into "transgressive" high-lit ages ago -- burroughs, acker, heck kafka.

and on the "border region" there's also certainly patricia highsmith!

So what about people who are a) very heavily invested in video games and comics but b) look down on pop music

That's a common one that interests and frustrates me

Pop music strikes me as way more problematic than video games and comic books just on its cultural footprint.
They're closer to metal? Somewhere between a niche genre and major commercial entity

Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and plenty of old ghost story and gothic writers. There are quite a few contemporary horror authors who are pretty well respected but just aren't that well known.

Been reading (horror/weird fiction critic, scholar, editor) ST Joshi recently and he points out several times that a large amount of the most famous writers of 1700s to early 1900s had a few if not a whole chunk of horror stories, some of these writers are only remembered or just best known for their horror stories. In Britain major publishers were fine with printing horror at a time when in America the genre was too associated with lowly pulp magazines; I think Britain changed its mind in the 50s.

The conversation about genre fiction acceptance is overdone but Jeff Vandermeer wrote a really good piece about it.
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/vandermeer_11_07/
Bruce Sterling insulting another writing by calling her "Shania Twain" might be relevant here.

writer not writing

One of the things that makes it hard to draw parallels in other media re the rockist/poppist dichotomy:

Rockism (re music) wants to value forms of musical creation that provide some guarantee (supposedly) of authentic self-expression, with a minimum of artifice (there's obviously a slew of dubious assumptions at work here, but as I understand it that is the ideology: distortion pedals are seen as extensions of the guitar which itself is an extension of the musician's body (loins really)). The thing about fiction (in books or film), however, is that the entire enterprise is about artifice. Works that are relatively direct expressions of the creator's inner soul are a specialized few (poetry provides lots of room for this, but these days it is a specialist genre read by few).

Painting is another beast altogether. I suppose expressionists of various types (Van Gogh, Pollock, etc) embody some rockist values, but the issue of representation or truth value seems so different here than in music, that I can't get my head around how you can fully deploy the dichotomy in this context.

There are actually a number of Horror dudes who get mainstream praise, Thomas Ligotti, Nate Kenyon, Laird Barron. you could add Brian Evenson too, though he has a range.

There's sort of a highbrow small press Horror writing world going back to those T.E.D. Klein Twillight Zone Magazine days and centering around Cemetary Dance

Glamorizing alcoholic/addict poets/writers feels like a rockism, the idea of suffering for your work in order for it to be great. The suffering artist given license to indulge themselves for the public as long as they can be sacrificed as cautionary dreamers.

popism is a myth perpetuated by those who give credence to other myths

so is zeus but he has awesome lightening bolts and shit

that was CGI:(

Are you referring to this paragraph?

I often have conversations with my female friends about the two sides of feminism: the complimentary, bestie feminism—the kind that Swift is currently selling—and the cutthroat, realistic, we-exist-in-this-male-world-too feminism, the kind that expects women to act to standards that have already been set for us, and to do so by acting better and stronger and in alignment with each other. I think that neither are necessarily “wrong,” though I do often find myself on the latter side of the fence.

If so, it's pretty late in Denmark and I'm not clearheaded enough to understand what it's supposed to mean. But I thought the point about Taylor's capitalist values was relevant (although I'm sort of feeling that maybe other people itt will find it too self-evident to be mentioned).

Maybe both sides are just different points of view seen through this critical lens that is being reduced into yet another cultural football team.

Is a non-capitalist pop star possible?

I thought popular music depended on the existence of capital.

Just thinkin' aloud here.

Taylor Swift Burn a Million Quid

cultural football team hehe

Were there stars in communist Russia? Jurij Gagarin? Anyway, I agree, in a capitalist society it's hard to imagine pop being in opposition to capitalism. But maybe some pop embraces capitalism more than other - or maybe Pitbull (my go to reference, but really, the guy had a sponsorship deal with Kodak where he would say the word "Kodak" in his songs) is no more capitalist than the Beatles were, he's just up front about it?

I'm pretty much repeating myself here - but I thought it was nice to see an article/thinkpiece that pointed out however obvious, that there's some tension between the down-to-earth-friend and larger-than-life-business Taylor Swift.

flappy bird heroically stanning for the angry birds movie reminded me of this thread

Feel like a lot of people used to be into way more interesting stuff.

they were also shorter and lived near the water

I'm picturing intelligent people looking in the mirror and crying after a long degrading day of writing and arguing about mediocre pop film and tv.

I'm picturing a tree

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQDeU6dHX-c

I'm picturing a tree

― saer, Thursday, 6 July 2017 14:33

I hope it's an interesting tree.

And when I die, I want to be a ghost that feeds on the regretful tears of dying popists who went too far in their apologia and analysis.

Before I die there will be ghosts who suck the tears from my eyes because I spent so much time sneeringly lurking around discussion of mediocre to poor pop culture.

Morbius will feed these ghosts more than I will.

They will whisper to me about the potent flavour of my Ready Player One movie vintage tears.

Last night a ghost said all this intermittently when sucking on my eyes...

"You wanted to remove that Ready Player One movie thread bookmark, you wanted to spend your life more meaningfully, but you were just like the rest of them, far too weak to resist.

You told yourself that there might be something that made it worthwhile, like that hilarious Jared Leto fashion photo sequence in the Suicide Squad movie thread, but even that wasn't justification enough. No ILX poster has the power to save these threads.

Those Mahavisnu Orchestra, Judas Priest, Sisters Of Mercy, Mahler, Sibelius, Delius and Incredible String Band box sets and Cardiacs piles have been sitting unfinished for years and you still look at these threads. "

Then it told me about Οὖτις's delicious Game Of Thrones tears.

lol

flappy bird is giving this a good go maybe

Poetry rockism: http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=10090 - the terms of this argument are more or less identical to ye olde rockism-about-rock.

The controversy sparked (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/23/poetry-world-split-over-polemic-attacking-amateur-work-by-young-female-poets ) suggests poetry anti-poetyrockism is nascent, or at least possible.

Unfortunately the Poetry world is always full of this “THis is not real poetry” shit. I remember when political poetry wasn’t real poetry, or performance poetry wasn’t real poetry or LANGUAGE poetry wasn’t real poetry or basically anything that was not to the taste of the editors of the twenty or so highest profile journals wasn’t real poetry (this used to include most poetry by POC.) I’m not sure why different genres of writing can’t be allowed to co-exist—like, are Dance music writers always issuing denunciations of Metal?

Protecting standards used to be a big deal in academic writing programs. I remember a fiction professor on the first day of class handing out an essay he had written explaining what was literary fiction and what was genre fiction and why the latter was inferior. He compared Moby Dick and Jaws because they were both about sea creatures.

cross-ref w/ literary clusterfucks thread

just read the links on the pre-bump revive. i mean the poetry she's critiquing is properly ghastly tbh

I'm afraid many "clever, insightful" critics tend to be big fans of shaming the unwashed masses. I said fuck it a long time ago and got a subscription to Entertainment Weekly.

― Darin, Thursday, July 3, 2014 3:04 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

thread honestly should have been over here, this is the undercurrent of so much discourse that purports to be about something more elevated than this

https://giphy.com/media/94EQmVHkveNck/200.webp

Lemme try that again:

http://giphygifs.s3.amazonaws.com/media/94EQmVHkveNck/giphy.gif