When even bell hooks can’t critique Beyoncé and not make us cringe we’ve basically gone market-Völkisch: we can sense, instinctively, that what the mechanisms of the market (back then state) make coalesce into ‘the people’s voice’ speaks with a moral force that only decadents will set a course apart from or not want to get in on. Like every Völkisch movement this is happening because we really, really want community and social system to align, and making social system answer to community requires, like, advanced-stage communism so we go the other way around.
Popular Culture & High Art’s Long Freaky Friday
I think that we’re in a weird era where popular culture, or its margins, is the place for many-layers-to-the-onion, world-of-thought-unto-itself, slow-burner artworks, and high art’s the place for all-there-on-the-surface, meaning-is-the-dent-it-makes, you-hit-them-in-the-face-with-everything-you’ve-got works. I know that not everybody feels this way, but if you do then maybe you’ll agree that it’s cause nowadays it’s super hard to gage how far the wick of a slow-burner runs, or how much its new world of thought is going to enrich your own, so absent the assurance of a Woolf or Proust or James slow burners have to first set you aflame with fangirlish* obsession so there’s something to breath fire into the equations.
