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Don't Believe the Hype: Animadversions on the Critique of Popular Art

1993; Duke University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1773143

1527-5507

Richard Shusterman,

Aesthetic Perception and Analysis

In the aim of promoting greater legitimation for popular art, this paper critically examines the major philosophical arguments against the aesthetic legitimacy of such art. The paper's position is one of meliorism, which recognizes popular art's flaws and abuses but also its merits and potential. The meliorist position holds that popular art should be improved because it leaves much to be desired, but also that it can be improved because it can and often does achieve real aesthetic merit. (Meliorism insists, moreover, that if popular art is dismissed as altogether undeserving of aesthetic attention, its aesthetic quality will suffer further, since its assessment will be abandoned completely to market forces.) In making its case for meliorism, the paper refutes the major arguments for holding that popular art cannot help but be aesthetically worthless, and it concentrates on the following so-called intrinsic defects of popular art: spuriousness, passivity, superficiality, and lack of creativity.