Problem Pop

published in Memo No.3, Melbourne, 2025

Maria Kozic's Anxiety Chronicles (2003-2004)

excerpt

Could there be a more vague, more abused, more assumed concept than ‘pop’? Sure, any single term or label behaves similarly, like a squirming worm impaled on a taxonomic hook fishing for meaning in the Arts. Yet my reading of ‘pop’ defaults to its negative origins, wherein lie both its cultural separation from the Arts, and its contextual importation by the Arts. I would argue that little has changed in the Arts in the past half century in terms of ‘pop’ developing or transforming beyond those post-war battles staged between high and low cultures.

But isn’t it redundant to state this now, when every print, online and platform organ of culture has its ‘pop culture critics’: armies of graduate gig drones who write with evangelist zeal, revolutionary romance and delirious naiveté on the high-versus-low collapse in fandom, celebration, community and selfhood? To answer my own question: no. Because the anthropological embrace of societal populism in so many fancons, crowdfunders and memegens is but a semiotic literalization of how entrenched and ‘embodying’ the market operations of mass and multi-niche cultural entertainment has become over the past few decades. Everything now is content just for you and your feelings. Guilty pleasures have become innocent statements; ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ has become ‘so-good-it-can’t-be-bad’. The nerds are avenged; the dismissed are deified. But defining, discussing and divining ‘pop’ remains as problematic as it ever was.

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Text © Philip Brophy. Image © Maria Kozic.