Contemporary Popular Culture and Social Criticism

Popular art and so-called mass culture have become a kind of “wonderland” and must be understood as a central phenomenon for contemporary intellectuals to address. This is, not least, due to their role in compelling us to broaden and rethink a part of the vocabulary and conceptuality of certain academic disciplines (such as aesthetics, for example), because of their leading role in shaping our sensus communis. More generally, such attention also has to do with their undeniable impact and influence on people’s opinions and taste preferences, their choices as consumers of commodities of all kinds, and even on their sociopolitical views at a global level. On this basis, attempting to craft an adequate theory to fit mass-art forms has become one of the major preoccupations for art theorists, sociologists of culture, and also philosophers in the last decades, in a somehow comparable way to the preoccupation for attempting to accommodate avant-garde artworks in the twentieth century.