A Plea for Art: Against the Tyranny of Our Poptimist Dystopia

On pop, poptimism, pop psychology, populism, and the homogenization of Spirit

A reto-surrealist musical number—”I Got Soul, But I’m Not A Soldier” —from Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006), a film that prophetically envisioned the poptimist nightmare to come.

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I’ve spent too many hours in my life fighting the art populism wars, impotently feuding against the dominant cultural impulse of our time, the infantilization of all culture. Consider the notion of a place for mature art, or serious art, or highbrow art, pick whatever term you like; you will find that the war was long ago lost, and the populists won. Comic book movies won. Music where late adolescent women sing autotuned over horrifically overproduced beats won. High art, art that seeks to inspire deeper, rarer, and more difficult experiences than momentary pleasure, art that takes as part of its sacred duty the work of discomforting its audience, is on life support. And, increasingly, acolytes of the old ways like me arrive pre-marginalized, assumed out of the conversation, congregants for a dead religion. The people have spoken.

You could tell a lot of stories about how we got here, how we ended up with an artistic culture that’s disdainful of art, a critical apparatus that distrusts criticism. The economic story, like most economic explanations, is both true and insufficient. The studios and record labels and platforms figured out that comfort sells and risk doesn’t, and simply gave us what the spreadsheets demanded – and what the spreadsheets demanded was familiar, free of ambiguity, and made for children. It’s surprising how well these three adjectives work across mediums and genres, by the way. Star Wars movies are familiar, free of ambiguity, and made for children. Zombie TV shows are familiar, free of ambiguity, and made for children. Modern pop music, adolescent and thudding and written by Swedish 40-year-olds with a taste for literalism, is familiar, free of ambiguity, and made for children. Romantasy novels are very often familiar and free of ambiguity, and though ostensibly adult in their sexual scenarios and romantic interests, made for childish, because stunted, sensibilities. Video games don’t have to be familiar, free of ambiguity, and made for children, but, well…. They almost always are.

The marketplace advantage of such art is obvious: audiences prefer to be comforted by the familiar rather than challenged by the new, they often hate the discomfort inherent to ambiguity and would much prefer to have everything spelled out for them, and even setting aside the many adult children our culture now produces, the category “adults plus children” will always be larger than the category “just adults.” They call this the total addressable market, in some contexts, and the math is stark and unforgiving.

There are other stories we could tell about this devolution in taste, though. The technological explanation is that the algorithm learned to feed us the thing we already liked until wanting anything else felt like an error. In the olden times, you learned of other art to enjoy from other human beings, very often passionate enthusiasts who would deliberately point you towards the novel, the difficult, the uncompromising. The algorithm doesn’t know or care about artistic novelty or difficulty or refusal to compromise. It only knows what you’ve clicked on before and thus what you’re likely to click on again. There’s also a neurological explanation, which holds that art ultimately entices us because of its capacity to provoke a reaction in our brains, and the kind of art we get today is more shameless about ceaselessly stimulating our dopamine or our serotonin or whatever monoamine is currently en vogue. I suppose that this story is also not incorrect.

True though they may be, these stories are reductive and boring and let us off the hook. The sad truth is that the machine only works because we wanted it. Nobody force-fed us the slop. We opened wide, our mouths or our legs, take your pick. As is generally true in life, the structural answers can explain but they can never illuminate, and the reality is that we ourselves told the entertainment industries what we wanted, and what we wanted was slop. And to understand why, you have to look past the culture industry and toward the actual culture, the ambient one, the one made of self-help paperbacks and therapy-speak and “inspirational” Instagram memes, all the apparatus through which we express our demands. Our artistic culture collapsed into childishness and obviousness and sentimentality because we’re living in the golden age of the excuse.

Never in human history have so many resources been devoted to exculpation; books, apps, podcasts, yes, but also therapists, motivational speakers, gurus, a bottomless scroll of pastel affirmation. For those eager to buy, there’s always someone selling you the idea that you’re forgiven, that you aren’t responsible, that no one should expect more from you. So much effort, marshaled toward the singular project of convincing you that you are already, exactly as you are, completely fine… though it’s a kind of fine that implies your fundamental fragility.

It’s a message you cannot possibly avoid if you’re even minimally online. You are enough! You don’t have to earn rest; you deserve self-care, you have a right to self-care. You’re not obligated to be talented to achieve success in whatever field you choose; you’re entitled to success by virtue of the intensity of your desires. Your feelings are valid; set whatever boundaries you wish; protect your peace. Some of these have legitimate applications, which is unsurprising considering how many of them have been ripped from specific medical contexts. But taken together, absorbed daily, and metabolized into the very grammar of how we speak to others and ourselves, they amount to something else: a vast and intricate architecture of exoneration, a permanent scaffolding erected around the ego with the explicit structural purpose of ensuring that the load of judgment never, ever comes to rest on you. You’re too neurodivergent to bear the weight of being a human! You’re too traumatized. You’re too delicate. Nothing can or should be asked of you because of your extreme vulnerability. I personally would find that notion quite insulting, but many of our country’s busiest meritocrats seemingly embrace it. Whether we should be insulted by it or not, the inevitable implication of therapeutic culture is that you are helpless.

And there’s the connection to the art populism debate. The demand that you go easy on yourself and the demand that you be given the right to only consume the culture that flatters and anesthetizes you are the same demand; they have to be. You can’t raise a person to refuse all standards for their own life and expect that person to be brave when it comes to the media they consume, to ask for the exact challenge and uncertainty in art that they have rejected in life. The muscle you train by telling yourself every morning that you owe the world nothing and that the world owes you validation doesn’t switch off when you open up Netflix. It flexes. It says, “why should this movie have to be good, when I don’t have to be good?” What use is critical judgment when the whole point of everything we’ve built in the therapeutic era is that the word “should” is a form of violence? The “let people enjoy things” school of criticism and the “you are enough” affirmation industry are close cousins, born of the same stuff.

What we have done, in effect, is extend to art the same amnesty we extended to ourselves, and we’ve done it out of the same motive: fear. We’re afraid of standards because standards imply a distance between where we are and where we might be, and we’ve spent years in therapy learning to stop feeling bad about that distance. The great unspoken terror of the therapeutic age is not fear of failure but fear of aspiration, the vertiginous suggestion that you are not yet what you could be, that there’s a better version of you somewhere up on the mountain, and that getting there would require what culture has trained you to experience as trauma: being told, honestly, that what you’ve done so far is not good enough. That you are not good enough.

That is of course a hard lesson, but it’s also a very valuable one, an essential one. Challenging art teaches you that lesson; great art insists on it. A great novel is, among other things, a document that is more human than human, that goes further than it has to in the effort to convey the human experience. A great, challenging novel knows things you don’t, says things that will not flatter you, and will not stop doing its work until it’s rearranged something in your chest. And who could stand that? We’ve spent years learning that discomfort is always, always a sign of harm. And so we took the only reasonable action a therapeutic civilization could take with an art form built on productive discomfort: we got rid of it. We replaced it with #content, which is art that has agreed as a condition of existence never to ask anything of you at all.

This is why the defensiveness always runs so hot, why a mild pan of a popular movie or show or song now reads as a personal attack, why “who hurt you?” is deployed against anyone caught having a standard. It isn’t really about the song or the show or the game. The issue is that aesthetic hierarchy of any kind has become the last obscenity, the one judgment we’re no longer permitted to make, because to say that one thing is better than another is to admit that better exists. And if better exists out there, in the world of songs and books and movies, then it exists out here for us too, in the world of our lives, and that way lies the intolerable thought that we might have gone too easy on ourselves. Anti-elitism is the snobbery of those who have decided that the glory of great art is not worth bearing the thought that someone else might have better taste than we do. So we haven’t democratized taste; we abolished it so no one ever has to come in second, so that no one ever must face the implied judgment of other people’s preferences.

In art and in life, the therapeutic moment has sacrificed growth for the safety of the same old thing, for the familiar, the soothing, the pleasures of the womb. We wanted so badly to stop hurting that we agreed to stop growing, and we called this agreement self-care, and we hung it on the wall in a nice font. The old difficult art is still there, waiting, patient as a mountain, ready. It never needed for us to be “enough”; it only ever asked that we be willing, willing to be challenged, willing to suffer. That was its gift, that it asked for more than we had and trusted us to go and get it. We used to call that love, adult love. Now we call it toxic. And the saddest thing is how gentle it all felt, how reasonable, how much like taking care of ourselves, right up until the lights went down and stayed down, and we sat there in the dark, comfortable, validated, enough, waiting for artistic fulfillment that never came.