Just Looking ...

Prof. Kalmar suggested yesterday that it would be hard to come up with any general criteria that determine whether a text enters pop culture. I think I disagree, because what qualifies something for being a piece of pop culture is not any particular aesthetic standard but just whether it's popular or not. So whatever traits tend to make a piece popular in general are just those traits that qualify it for pop-culturedom.

The only two good-sounding criteria I can imagine are that the text be easily digestible (or it can't spread enough to gain popularity) and rewarding to consume (or nobody would want it to spread anyway). Of course, those are fairly vague on their own, because what people in a given place or time find rewarding and digestible will vary considerably compared to other places and times — but, if I'm right, there are nonetheless some real, empirical constraints on form (however transient and localized) that determine whether or not a text enters pop culture.

High art is the really interesting case, and there I'm almost persuaded, with Prof. Kalmar, that form is virtually irrelevant. Indeed, at least in the Western world, the 20th century seems to have been an exercise in proving form to be irrelevant to whether or not our culture accepts a piece as high art. Not everyone can can their poop and put it in a gallery, however; something outside of the artwork itself is what's valued — something to do with irony, novelty or shock value, and the themes that the artist and critics read into it. So it's not so much a removal of any standards at all (or there'd be a lot of people earning vast sums for their blank canvases and cans of poop), but, perhaps, a dramatic shift from aesthetic standards that judge form to ones that focus entirely on the surrounding practice.