W. David Marx

‘One Battle After Another’: A Second Opinion With Van Lathan - The Ringer On a very special bonus episode of the podcast, Van Lathan joins the show and gets the chance to share his perspective on the box office debate for ‘One Battle After Another,’ share his overall though...

Good discussion of this here: ‘One Battle After Another’: A Second Opinion With Van Lathan - The Ringer share.google/zQOODtbSagpB...

Coolness eventually trickled down to the very people it was created to devalue

(Impeccable comic timing that this happened right after the anti-anti-poptimists took a victory lap that they settled the poptimism debate once and for all with "Poptimism has never been a pro-pop ideology.")

The New Yorker: The editorial policy that Taylor Swift is incapable of making a bad album

New York Times: Album gets perfectly positive review from Jon Caramanica

Normal people: Yeah, this sucks

Actual music criticism in 2025: "Swift is masterly when it comes to making money."

Jezebels, race kink and Cardi B: in One Battle After Another, Black women are still stereotypes With its hyper-sexualised Black female revolutionary and fetishised depiction of interracial relationships, Paul Thomas Anderson’s much-lauded latest raises questions about how white male directors de...

www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

The end of Taylor Swift’s era, the symbol of the end of American pop music as synecdoche for global pop music, is uncertain. Marvel might be providing a glimpse of her future: a gradual overextension, relative sales erosion, and a mass sense of everyone (read: casual fans) being sick of the project, with a core of diehards keeping things high-selling but the extended universe losing its luster of untouchability. In that event, Taylor Swift would “settle” into being an A-list star who outsells everyone else but no one talks about much: a mere Sheeran. A few things probably won’t happen: Taylor Swift will not be “dethroned” by another American artist. Barring a major scandal (politics, drug use, cult shit, a long string of extremely bad movies), her status as a sales leader won’t diminish much until she decides to stop making music (the Rihanna story), even if her general cultural status according to cultural commentators and magazine profile writers ebbs (the Eminem story). Once Taylor Swift is no longer #1, there won’t be a #1 to return to, and it will be clear to everyone, if it wasn’t already, that pop music as an American art form is now a geeky, small-potatoes niche format like comics and theater, not a transnational commercial concern.

Thought this was pretty shaky when I wrote it (at peak Eras tour/TIME profile) but so far it's....less shaky

Carl Wilson's pleasant definition of poptimism: "Taylor Swift has the potential to be rewarding and is worthy of serious critical attention."

Actual music criticism in 2025: "Taylor Swift might not be *capable* of making a bad record"

I know there's a lot of political news, but it'd be nice to get some hard answers on why Obama chose Charli's "365" over "360" on last year's playlist

21st century culture in one paragraph:

Also the nepobaby angle!

Hey, the "hamster nests" made my book as a signature work of post-9/11 downtown NYC.

I don't know what it's called when something is beyond art but this is that thing

Oh wow I'm just noticing now that it says HOLY SHIT if read upside down. Art is WILD

Dan Colen's "Holy Shit (2004–06)" truly embodies the Kantian ideal of art in its inherent mysteriousness: How could the artist have even come up with such an incredible idea, let alone executed it? It's a total inimitable enigma.

Also: Boiler Room tells the story from the perspective of labor—an employee anxious about the corruption of higher authorities.

The Wolf of Wall Street invites the viewer to wear the shoes of a successful founder-entrepreneur whose dreams the authorities keep trying to squash

A clear value shift in films about Jordan Belfort's fraudulent brokerage Stratton Oakmont:

Boiler Room (2000): the moral dilemma of ripping people off

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013): the jubilation of ripping people off, because it's more noble to have been rich once than to have stayed poor

Whatever side you're on in this debate, there is always the possibility of creating a new kind of criticism that squares the circle, that shuns the biases of the past while still optimizing critics' power as the discoverers and explainers of exciting new art. That's where our optimism should go.

There is a very real and successful value system that centered criticism around explicating deep artistic intention within cynical commercial output, and if we want to separate this from early 2000s "poptimism," fine, but we need a word for it, because it's an actual thing with consequences

The only way, apparently, to make the argument that anti-poptimism is fully a straw-man argument is to straw man anti-poptimist arguments and wave away all the detrimental pro-pop arguments as "off-brand poptimism."

Wilsonian-style poptimism has not been the debate for about 20 years now

I've written much about reclaiming pro-innovation criticism from an explicitly non-snob perspective, yet Wilson cherry-picks one line from my newsletter to lambast me for heralding the death of all "pop-culture criticism" when literally in the next sentence, I'm praising The Rehearsal and 100 Gecs.

Wilson also admits that "a subgroup of critics...specifically valorized pop qualities including showmanship, artifice, production, image, brightness, humor, and catchiness" but they also don't count, apparently. This is just "their taste" not poptimism, so they're also stricken from the record.

To establish this pleasant definition as the only legitimate one, Wilson has to strike from the record K. Sanneh's NYT manifesto-essay from poptimism, which I keep pointing out, made its pro-pop critique by being (1) openly pro-artifice (2) openly pro-capital (3) reverse-snob contrarian

Grumps Blame It for Everything From the Rise of Taylor to the Fall of Pitchfork. They Don’t Even Understand It. Criticism’s most abused straw man.

There would be no debate about poptimism if it followed Carl Wilson's definition: "Poptimism posited that all kinds of music have the potential to be rewarding and are worthy of serious critical attention, including the music on the pop charts."

This makes me a poptimist.

slate.com/culture/2025...

There seems to be zero imagination that we can revive criticism as a means for encouraging more creative invention. Just immediately: "oh, you just want to bring back mean discrimination against low culture"—apparently even among advocates!

So, no, we don't need snobbery to promote artistic value

In an era of AI slop and mid TV, is it time for cultural snobbery to make a comeback? The lowbrow dominates culture and anyone who questions the status quo is dismissed as an elitist killjoy. But with bland algorithmic content on the rise, perhaps we consumers should start taking our a...

Incredibly depressing that "promoting the enduring artistic qualities of complexity, ambiguity, and innovation" can only be understood as "snobbery," which denotes "taste discrimination by people with status anxiety."

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

SUMMER IS OVER (about one week ahead of schedule)

Definitely would enjoy that

Did you get a copy of Blank Space? I can get you one

Not mad but I wrote a newsletter about the effects of poptimist values on the macro-narrative of our era (not addressed in your piece) and you cherry picked out one line at the end (not from my book) and added a reductive opinion of my thinking *as if* that was the context of my line