Confessions of a Former Poptimist
A tale of disenchantment
One of the wild things about growing older is that you get to think back to times in your life when you held views that now seem totally alien and strange from your current perspective.
It's crazy to me, for instance, that I used to have passionate opinions about which video game systems were the best. Not just which ones were most fun to play, but which ones were morally superior to others. I was team Atari, then team Genesis, then team Playstation. I didn't even think those systems were better than the competition. I only wanted them to be better. If anything, I thought of them as plucky underdogs struggling to succeed in a cruel and unjust world.
Incredible. Was that me? Was I really ever the kid who held those views? Thinking back to the boy I used to be feels like living in a science fiction story where I'm watching the antics of some hapless stranger, shaking my head in bemused disapproval, then pulling back for the spit-take and gasping—"Wait! It's a warp in the time-space continuum! That's not a hapless stranger. That's me."
In the same way, it's mindboggling to me now that I used to be a resolute poptimist. I really was. I was radically anti-snob. I was a stalwart advocate of all things pop and a fervent scourge of everything I deemed pretentious. I was a brave defender of video games as an art form. I was an avid collector of fantasy illustration. I played Madonna and Michael Jackson and Sting CDs in defiance of my hard-rock-loving friends. I ranted to friends about how James Cameron was the Shakespeare of our time.
Above all, I was a committed enemy of anyone who dared to pronounce judgment on these works, or—even worse—unfairly dismiss them. I raged against the pompous critics who wrote for Rolling Stone. I spat fire at the mere sight of the New Yorker. I scorned the recommendations of teachers and intellectuals. I hated, with a soul-shaking fury, anything that so much as smacked of snooty standards: old literature, modern art, jazz, hipster music, art theaters, urban scenes, experimentalism, David Foster Wallace, anything that might conceivably be labeled avant-garde.
When the internet ramped up into a major cultural force, I welcomed its demotic potential as a godsend. Here, at last, was the righteous tide that would sweep the gatekeepers out of their ivory towers, batter down the temples of the poseurs and pretenders, elevate the authentic tastes of the street, of the suburbs, of the indoor mall. No more smug condescension from those silver-tongued frauds who pretended to like incomprehensible twaddle, like sculpture made out of poop, abstract art, or twelve-tone music. Power to the people. Love abides.
That was me. I really was that guy. I have vivid memories of sitting around the Columbia campus with likeminded friends, fervently nodding and laughing and yes-yes-ing as we ticked off the stations of the poptimist cross.
Don't people realize that taste is subjective? Don't people realize that culture evolves? Don't people realize that so, so much of what we call high art used to be considered popular art in the past? What about those poor hopeless scolds a hundred years ago that panicked over people reading novels. Novels! Can you imagine? Those idiots.
Well, not anymore. I still like a lot of those works, as it happens. I still love video games as an art form. I still like pop music and fantasy illustration. I still like old-school action movies with slimy monsters and stupefying stunts. But am I a poptimist? Oh, God, no.
Some of that has to do with changing tastes. Or maybe it has to do with how taste changes. I think back to a time about a decade ago. I was in a rough place. The usual pick-me-ups of the internet weren't working—all those people piping up to hate and love on my behalf. I needed a hit of something smoother. But my old favorite genres weren't connecting. No idea why. Maybe I'd worn the groove too deep. Maybe I'd heard those types of tunes—not the songs themselves, but the styles of songs—too many times. That's one thing they don't tell you about getting older, or if they do try to tell you, it never sticks. The same way you can wear out a favorite hit by playing it over too many times, you can wear out whole genres, whole modes, whole categories of sensory experience. Like watching water gush from a faucet straight into an open drain.
I did something I'd rarely done before. I looked up classical music. I still remember the song that got me—it was this one, by Holst. Pure auditory nectar. I'm not sure why, but it worked on me. I was in the right place. It felt—and I know how this will sound—it felt like a massive, mindblowing upgrade of the video game music I'd always loved. Afterwards, I started to feel a kind of bitterness. Because I know absolutely nothing about classical music. I'd scarcely ever thought about it before. It was old-timey stuff. Inaccessible. Off limits. Music for the snoots. And now that I was starting to take an interest, I had no training, no background, no theory, no nothing. Except a crushing sense of how much I'd been missing.
That experience changed me. But what changed me more, I think, is hanging out with other-poptimist-minded folks over the years. It was like a loss of faith. I just gradually stopped believing in their arguments, until I eventually came to feel an apostate's fury toward the whole point of view. That's how most changes of heart actually happen, I believe: you don't rationally update your ideas in the face of opposing arguments. You get more and more fed up with hearing the arguments from your own side, until eventually something snaps.
All of which goes to say that I couldn't possibly aspire to argue anyone else out of being a poptimist. All I can do is try to sketch the story of my own evolution. It really has been quite a transformation. The way I used to feel about critics who extolled the pretentious twaddle of James Joyce or Mark Rothko is now almost exactly how I feel about critics who leap to the defense of pop culture. Hot behind the eyes, heart pounding at my ribs—how can people peddle this nonsense? My beef with poptimists is at heart a personal one: they remind me of the snobs of yore, but somehow even worse. Self-assured and insufferable, but impudent to boot. Snobs posing as anti-snobs. Get me my ipecac.
On the face of it, poptimism makes a good case. The poptimist argument starts with the claim that some forms of art, especially new forms of art, have been unfairly dismissed or scorned. Poptimism counsels us to take a philosophical view: if you step back and think about it, all forms of culture are doing roughly the same things, communicating thoughts and ideas and feelings from person to person and soul to soul, bringing freshness and variety to life, diverting us from our troubles, bringing us together in moments of sadness or giving us opportunities for shared fun. Anything you might say in praise of one art form—that it takes effort to master, or uplifts the spirit, or has hidden complexity—will be said with just as much conviction by defenders of other forms, and it's difficult if not impossible to find definitive, objective reasons for believing one particular genre is superior to another. At a more basic level, all culture exists because people want it to exist—because people choose to make it, enjoy it, share it. In that fundamental sense, all culture has value.
So why do some forms of human culture get to be considered higher or better than the others? Simple. It's because certain people compel or convince others to feel ashamed of their cultural tastes. It's a power trip, right? All culture exists because people find comfort and joy in it. But some people get off on using their authority to convince other people their culture is vulgar, illegitimate, and dumb. Which, if you think about it, is an underhanded way of convincing those people that they're vulgar, illegitimate, and dumb. Which is an obnoxious thing to do.
If there's one good reason for preferring one form of art to another, it's because different arts are embedded in different societies, and different societies can have better or worse values. We all know some societies have terrible values. And while the relation between culture and society is a messy one, we should definitely be suspicious of the ways in which bad societies exploit art to do their dirty work.
But wait a minute. Making people feel worthless, vulgar, or dumb for enjoying perfectly harmless forms of culture is itself an expression of bad values! It's a bad thing to do! If I like chocolate, and you like vanilla, we can each have our ice cream cones and be happy. No one needs to be right and no one needs to be wrong. But if I try to convince you that liking vanilla makes you a bad person, if I shame you or force you into pretending to like it, if I somehow use my influence or power to screw up your life because you like vanilla ice cream, then I'm decidedly in the wrong. I just am. Doesn't matter if chocolate is a wonderful flavor: I'm still wrong. And if lots of chocolate-lovers go around humiliating and abusing vanilla-lovers on a regular basis, it's fair to be suspicious of chocolate lovers as a rule. Simple truth.
That’s the case for poptimism as I would have put it around the early 2000s. A case made by a nerdy kid who spent 80+ hours playing FFVII and cherishes those memories to this day. Maybe it's not the official poptimist line—is there an official poptimist line?—but I think those sentiments ought to qualify me for former membership in the poptimist club. I was a believer.
As years went by though, reservations piled up. The poptimist worldview as I understood it imagines a kind of ecology of taste, where all the little consumers are doing their own things, acting in accord with their natural instincts, and everyone has a role to play in the greater tapestry of cultural life. But taste isn't like that. It isn't something you just plain have, as a kind of inborn orientation. I know people who love playing progressive rock and reading fat books and playing pickup basketball, but they had to acquire certain skills and rudiments before they could fully enjoy those activities. I also find that you appreciate something more if you know a lot about how it works. So taste depends on education—you have to learn certain things before you can have certain kinds of taste. Then there's the influence of tradition, where, say, people who make horror movies today are drawing inspiration from horror movies in the past. So the tastes of history inform taste in the present. And the influence of criticism, in that people are constantly talking about what culture means to them and why, and those conversations amount to a kind of cultural practice in their own right. So taste is formed in part by social pressure. And experience: there are no doubt thousands of forms of culture I have no taste for whatsoever—because I don't even know they exist! The tastes I do have, meanwhile, were very strongly influenced by the marketing efforts of large corporations in late twentieth-century America. So taste isn’t something you just plain have, like an essence; it's something we all learn to have, mostly from other people. Complaining that people are trying to "impose" their tastes on someone feels a bit weaselly. That's how you get taste in the first place! That's where it comes from!
There's another problem. People don't just enjoy the things they like in some mute quiescent way, serenely basking in the vibes of their chosen genres like Zen hermits chilling out by a fishpond. They want to say why they like what they like. They have reasons. But once you start listing out those reasons, they come to sound an awful lot like standards. And once you allow that you have standards, you're admitting, or at least implying, that some things, according to those standards, rate more highly than others. Even if you try to be very diplomatic and allow that everyone can have different sets of standards, someone else is going to hear your standards and think, "By that person's standards, the things I like are crap." This is something that becomes unavoidable when you're a parent, as you end up saying to your kid, as delicately as possible, "I have different tastes from you because I know more things." In practice, when we start talking about why we like what we like, it becomes almost impossible not to ruffle any feathers.
Finally, as I got older and learned more about art, I started to feel like my own attachment to poptimism sprang mostly from a strong aversion to modernism. I don't want to step on the toes of any art historians here, but it sure seems like the way we talk about these things has been strongly influenced by a particular period in the mid-twentieth century when everyone started making weird conceptual art. The modernists have always loomed in my mind as arch-elitists, the snobbiest of snobs, the most irritating practitioners of the you're-just-too-dumb-to-understand-it mode of criticism. But the modernists, in their day, were anti-tradition. They were the innovators, the iconoclasts, the guys who wanted to rip up the rulebook and get back to basics and connect with the pure uninhibited primitive wellspring of animal inspiration. Or whatever. They arguably did more to inspire poptimism than any other movement of the recent past. Besides, modernism was just one brief period in art history, and not an especially long-lived period either; it seems unusually important to us now because it happened within living memory. So our whole way of thinking about the value of culture, this idea that democratizing taste and demolishing standards is part and parcel of social progress, is actually of very recent vintage. Which means that this notion, too, might end up having a short shelf life. What if progress ends up steamrolling over our faith in progress itself?
Anyway. Those nagging doubts all fed into my turn away from poptimism. But the biggest factor was a growing feeling that poptimists, at some fundamental level, simply don't play fair.
On the face of it, poptimism is an ecumenical movement: everyone should like what they like, in the way they like it, and no one's ever right or wrong. In practice, though, whenever I get into conversations with poptimists, or follow their conversations online, they always seem to assume—or at least to strongly feel—that certain kinds of art, and certain ways of liking art, are inherently pretentious and therefore illegitimate, while other kinds of art, and other ways of liking art, are inherently genuine and therefore good. All the calls for open-mindedness are aimed in one direction. So if you're talking about Taylor Swift songs, or fan fiction, or video games, the poptimist will fervently defend the merits of these forms and insist that critics have been unfairly dismissive and need to be more curious and inclusive. But poptimists never seem to reciprocate by becoming openminded and curious about the virtues of classical music, or Faulkner, or the visual arts, or classical dance. They demand good faith, but don't give it in return.
Similarly, poptimists will argue up and down that the things they enjoy are deep and sophisticated according to any number of aesthetic standards, often very traditional ones. They'll wax poetic about how From Software games have deep bodies of lore that reward close attention, or how a pop star is admirable because she writes her own songs, or how everyone should watch a streaming TV show because of its ambiguity and complexity, or how a social media account is important because it gives us insight into the lives of teenagers today, or how Marvel films are significant because of the way they iterate on mythological tropes. But as soon as poptimists feel their tastes have been challenged, it's like an octopus startled by a shark: they start squirting out clouds of relativist rhetoric and you find yourself shadowboxing with a void. Who's to say why one thing is better or deeper than another? Who's to say it's admirable to play your own instrument? Who's to say complexity is a virtue? Who's to say verisimilitude is important? Who's to say we should value tradition? What kind of arrogant, judgmental jerk would even make those kinds of distinctions? Again, the inclusive gesture is demanded but not reciprocated: the poptimist makes aesthetic arguments but doesn't listen to them in turn.
Third, poptimists, despite their avowed inclusiveness, have a way of framing everything in terms of zero-sum conflicts for cultural dominance. Whenever some crusty old cultural steward pipes up to argue, for instance, that people should spend less time watching TV and more time going to art events, the anguished cry of the poptimist is, "But why can't we have both?" That's exactly the point, though: people should be doing both! Maybe not individually every day, but overall we should want to see a population with a wide variety of interests. And right now, people aren't doing both; they're spending eight hours a day on video games and TV and TikTok and approximately zero hours on literature and museums. Isn't the whole idea supposed to be that all different arts have value? Somehow, though, the idea that all different arts have value has morphed into the idea that all different arts are interchangeable, and that it's therefore totally fine and natural for one or two art forms, like streaming video and video games, to completely crowd out and replace most of the others.
Finally—and here's the famous third rail—I find that poptimist arguments are often very strongly gendered in a way that's starting to drive me crazy. At the very least, there's often a screamingly loud sexual subtext. I get this most often from the distaff side: a poptimist extolling the virtues of, say, Taylor Swift or erotic fan fiction will usually tack on a complaint about how people who don't admire her favorite creators are devaluing women's lived experience and delegitimizing femininity itself, and precisely because taste is entirely subject we should bow to the dominance of work that speaks to what women and girls are going through today, and if you can't appreciate these strong female artists, it must be because you're bad and blinkered in a way that aligns with the systemic injustices of the patriarchy. But there's also a boy version of poptimist culture, one that I'm susceptible to myself, where any suggestion that video games or action movies might not be the unquestioned acme of human achievement is treated as the output of a scolding, feminized establishment that's corrupting and undermining the classic male virtues. All I can say is, if we're going to keep arguing this way, maybe we should put aside the question of taste and focus on clearing up some other issues first. Because it sure seems like people have a lot of other issues to deal with here.
The worst thing, though, is that these dynamics have produced a kind of ratchet effect that I'm starting to find quite alarming. Remember, the idea that art forms should regularly pass into obsolescence is actually a fairly new invention. Until only a handful of decades ago, people in America were still listening to orchestral music, reading long books, writing metrical verse, going to plays, singing folk songs, painting pictures, and telling stories to their children, much as they had for thousands of years. When I was growing up, it was still possible to think that the decline of all these kinds of "fine art" and "folk art" had been caused by the transition to mass media, and that the painful upheaval this occasioned was something of a one-time deal. (I suppose it's still possible to believe this, in which case the cultural "stagnation" we hear so much about might reflect the end of that transition. We'll see.) Really, though, that's not what seems to be happening. Instead, all the new kinds of pop art we were urged to admire are now getting thrown on the junk heap in turn. And there's a pretty clear trend away from forms that depend on deep knowledge of history, toward new media that suck up more of our time but demand less effortful study. Formal poetry gives way to prose literature gives way to genre fiction gives way to YA fiction gives way to not reading anything at all. Theatre gives way to film gives way to streaming gives way to streaming while using your phone gives way to watching thirty-second TikTok videos one after another. Symphonies give way to jazz give way to rock albums give way to pop singles give way to putting music on in the background while you do something else. The newest argument seems to be that taste in art will soon give way to taste in fandom itself, i.e. that the creative frontier of the future is making clamorous demands for gratification.
Advocates of each change have used a version of the same poptimist-style argument to justify abandoning the old forms. Classical music was too stiff and stuffy, so we needed jazz to loosen things up. Then jazz was too technically demanding, so we needed rock to keep things real. Then rock's emphasis on "authenticity" was held to be elitist, so rock and its sister genre folk came to be considered fusty and passe. Rap, with its heavy political themes, seems to have been the latest casualty. I admire all these forms in different ways, and I'm willing to allow that playlist curation or AI prompting can be creative achievements in their own right. But it really does seem awfully convenient that each of these poptimist revolutions, for all the fancy rhetoric about agnosticism of taste, ended up giving people permission to spend more and more time on activities that demand less and less painstaking study.
Are we really sure we're on the right track here? Really, really sure? Because it feels to me like we're on a treadmill over an abyss, and the speed keeps cranking up faster and faster, and more and more things we took for granted are tumbling off into the dark. Whoops, there goes opera. Whoops, we lost sculpture. Whoops, there goes the symphony, too. Rhetoric's gone. And that’s it for poetry. Poor girl held on for three thousand years, but don't worry, I'm sure we won't miss her. Whoops, there goes reading. Wait, reading? Yup, reading. Eh, don't worry, we probably don't need him, he's only been a cornerstone of complex societies since the dawn of history …
I don’t know. I really don’t know. The system we all take for granted, with a broad, literate, middlebrow middle class—that system is something of an anomaly. For most of history, the masses were distractible, disorganized, superstitious, emotive, and dominated by scribal and military castes. Small groups of people who have their s**t together can frequently outmaneuver huge groups of people who share frustrations, beliefs, interests, and needs but lack the wherewithal to coordinate their actions. We’ve already had a revolution that was televised, and look how that turned out. We’ve had successive revolutions that were Twitterized, and they come and go like … well, like memes. Culture matters. And I’m not convinced a nation of pop stans, Mario fans, TikTok trenders, and toy collectors, for all the consumer clout they can muster, will ever really amount to much.