The Missing Piece in Conversations about “Cultural Decline”

Critics in the 21st century embraced mass culture in a belief that it would liberate audiences — but it's directly responsible for triggering the feelings of stagnation

I enjoy Spencer Kornhaber’s music journalism, so I was excited to read his Atlantic feature “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” It's a solid introduction to the debate featuring Ted Gioia, Dean Kissick, Jaime Brooks, Kieran Press-Reynolds, and Simon Reynolds (who was arguably the first to theorize cultural stagnation in his important 2011 book Retromania).

Much like Katherine Dee’s “No, Culture is Not Stuck” piece from 2024, Kornhaber attempts to find the silver lining in an era dominated by sequels, song “interpolations,” and too-big-to-fail billionaire pop-stars. As I wrote about Dee’s piece last October, I am sympathetic to these optimistic takes. I, too, want to believe that it’s not the children but me who is so out of touch.

I agree with all of the analysis about culture industry trends that thwart the creation of art: data-driven decision making, reliance on IP, endless choices on streaming services, etc. In Status and Culture, I argued that the internet and globalization fundamentally reduce the status value of rare and innovative culture, which, whether we like it or not, changes how much we enjoy it.

But there remains a fundamental flaw in this entire debate: There is no consensus on what "cultural health" would entail. In fact, almost everyone avoids the topic. In trying to come up with an answer in this manifesto, I now understand why no one discusses it: The only way to define "progress" in culture is to draw clear lines between entertainment and art, something that has become extremely unpopular. This, however, is not just a rhetorical flaw in the argumentation about decline — but a core reason for the decline itself.

In writing my new book Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, I revisited the timeline and found that the sense of "stagnation" began before the aforementioned structural mechanisms kicked in. Prior to Spotify and Steve Bannon, the collective thinking on pop culture underwent a radical transformation. A new critical consensus demanded that we stop thinking about creativity in a hierarchical way: there was no "high" culture and "low" culture — just culture.

This ideology has become known as "poptimism," although I understand that most critics find the term derogatory. (Kornhaber told Derek Thompson on his podcast Plain English, “I’m accused of being a poptimist by my haters.") And as I've argued before, I think poptimism arrived from a good place: a fear that the focus on sophisticated art doesn't just alienate people with less education but actively harms them by invalidating their tastes.

But the runaway success of poptimist thinking has achieved its goal of changing how we value culture. This matters a lot to the debates about decline, because our cultural crisis of the moment isn't a crisis of creation or a crisis of distribution but a crisis of valuation. People still love pop culture, but they find the culture created today to be less valuable than culture created in the past.

Poptimism exacerbated our feelings of cultural decline in two ways. First, it made mass culture the center of the cultural conversation, which was bound to disappoint us. And, second, poptimist criticism provided a false promise that "creativity" can happen anywhere, ignoring the fact that some creative endeavors and formats are much more conducive to the kind of cultural invention that provides lasting works of art.

When Mass Culture is the Only Culture

In the 20th century, most elites believed that "art" described a rarified sphere of complicated symbolic activity, which stood in opposition to the "mass culture" of bland, sensationalist, lowest-common-denominator works made for profit. There was no confusing the two worlds, because there was a very high bar for what qualified as "art." The avant-garde concept of art was something like “creative alterations of established conventions within an aesthetic context that provide new stimulus, and in the best cases, force the audiences out of their basic cognitive modes to perceive stimulus in new ways.” This was very hard to achieve, which is why artists were afforded such high status. And that explains why artists like The Beatles, with all their money and fame, aspired to bring an avant-garde mindset into their work.

As much as this binary between art and mass culture has been critiqued as "elitist," it produced a very optimistic mindset. By disqualifying most mass culture, critics could ignore almost everything created in the big-bad “culture industry.” No one brooded over Warner Bros. releasing Police Academy 3 as a sign of "decline," because of course they released Police Academy 3 and would surely also make Police Academy 4. (They did.)

Critics instead spent their time and word-counts thinking about culture with artistic intentions, which raised the profile of these artworks to define the era (despite being unpopular in terms of raw audience numbers). This resulted in culture feeling healthy as long as a few inventive artists were still doing good work. This also created a clear sense of progression when art-minded TV shows like Twin Peaks or a dense intellectual satire like The Simpsons made it onto the “idiot box."

The poptimist generation of critics in the 21st century rejected this separation of high and low art. They argued that there was no meaningful difference between Mariah Carey and Kurt Cobain. And not only could mass culture be good, it must be good, because otherwise it wouldn’t be so beloved.

This ideological shift resulted in a major change in the media narrative around culture. Journalists began to report on pop culture like it was sports: The major leagues of Beyoncé and Jay-Z mattered, the minor leagues of avant-leaning weirdos didn’t. The political logic here was airtight: it would be elitist to give unpopular innovators more airtime than market winners. And even when critics tried to balance their major league coverage with some praise for innovators, the net result was still much more positive praise on mega-stars than ever before.

But this obviously contributed to a feeling of decline in the long-run, because mass culture continued to do the thing it always does: avoid artistic innovation in order to maximize profit. But once poptimism established that only the mainstream "mattered," it set up audiences to judge the health of culture on its least artistic output. If we have to think about Transformers: Rise of the Beasts as a representative artwork of our era, of course we’re doomed.

1994 is understood as a great year for American cinema, because it was the year of Pulp Fiction — which didn't even make it into the top ten highest grossing films. No one talked about The Flintstones being a harbinger of cultural decline, because no critic felt the need to even think seriously about The Flintstones.

The False Promise that Creativity Can Happen Anywhere

Not every creative endeavor provides the same degree of originality or formalistic mastery. A child's finger-painting is not equivalent to a Rothko. A work only verges towards art in challenging or playing with the existing conventions to create new aesthetic effects. Entertainment is a different kind of creative endeavor. It doesn't need to tinker with our brains. It just needs to provide enough stimulus to momentarily keep an audience's attention, and it can usually achieve this by tapping well-tested conventional formulas.

This way of differentiating art and entertainment, however, is anathema to the poptimist mission of eroding the differences between high and low art. Their solution was to cite the pointlessness of debating the ontology of art and be as vague as possible. Kornhaber defines "innovation" in his piece as humans “finding ways to express themselves in ways that suit the times that they live in.” And he believes the role of the critic is to "[appreciate] how human creativity flourishes anew in each era."

But this represents a much lower bar for what constitutes cultural progress compared to previous eras. Moreover we're all trying to diagnose cultural decline without thinking through the specific attributes of enduring art. Specifically, most lasting artworks engage in formalist experimentation, whether that be cubist painting, Virginia Woolf, The Beatles, or even Madonna. This is still true, which is why the radically new-sounding trap, drill, and hyperpop have been so influential in the new century.

But the entire premise of poptimism is to avoid giving credit to artist for formalist experimentation, and this has forced critics to work double-time to invent new ways that culture can be innovative outside of the artistic intention. This can go to ridiculous contrarian extremes. Rodney F Hill described Plan 9 from Outer Space — the worst film of all time — as an artwork that "pointedly rejects the conventions of logic, verisimilitude, and unity that characterize classical Hollywood cinema, in favor of a looser, more meandering plot structure, a flagrant disregard for the rules of continuity, and arguably a modernist or even Brechtian self-awareness of its own artificiality.” In a more recent example, Megan Garber argued in The Atlantic that Kim Kardashian was basically the new Duchamp: “In declaring herself, against all common sense, as art, she mocks and dares and provokes. She rejects what came before.”

Last year Sinéad O’Sullivan had a great piece in The New Yorker arguing that no one bothers to argue that Taylor Swift’s songs are musically innovative. But since her music connects with so many people, it must be good, and therefore, critics are on a mission to find the innovation somewhere. For Kornhaber, Swift has been “pioneering a futuristic form of storytelling: every verse and every public utterance links together an intricate web of ‘lore,’ which brings fans together for puzzle-solving and reinterpretation.” We can, I guess, add Swiftian lyricism to other futuristic forms of storytelling, such as Powerpoint slides and the AI-generated LinkedIn post.

The problem is that audiences are not so easily fooled, because they have internalized the entirety of artistic progress in the 20th century. They know when a song is just a jam and not a radical piece of transformative art. But in working to find intellectual content, even where there is none, critics were able to justify their placement of non-inventive mass culture into the center of the critical discourse.

Poptimism in the last decade has also led to a blindness towards which kinds of content lend themselves best to artistic experimentation. Kornhaber lists “short-form video, chatty podcasts, video games, memes” as formats with potential for innovation. While there is no question many people "express" themselves with these formats — running the full gamut from trad wives to J. D. Vance — they have yet to become spaces overflowing with the kind of formalist experimentation that radically expand the potential of human perception.

I appreciate Kornhaber's anti-declinist thinking, but I worry that he's fighting inside of a net. Culture is an ecosystem, and the overarching narrative of how we understand contemporary culture is stacked against the valuation of truly radical invention. Critics can list out all the high-quality art being made at the moment, but it can’t feel “progressive” without a total realignment of the critical discourse.

We have to do more than hope and pray that there is better culture out there. We have to reroute the entire discussion of culture to only champion the most radical forms of creative invention, no matter how many billionaires and pop stans' feelings that hurts. The Rehearsal or 100 Gecs will always feel like isolated events if critics operate from a value-system that treats them as sideshows to Taylor Swift, MCU, and the capitalization structure of Fenty. Radical art has succeeded in much more constricting social climates than the present — but those artists enjoyed the support of critics who believed in their work and didn't relegate them to the status of second-class creators.