Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: The Pop Issue

The Spring 2020 issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal is dedicated to Pop, a term as disputable as it is ubiquitous. The parameters of pop depend on what they exclude: pop culture may be popular, but it is also what high culture and subcultures are not. This issue will examine the pop category as a product of artistic elitism and as a site of social construction. Who is pop for? What is a general audience and what makes for widespread appeal? What happens when a product of popular culture is embraced ironically or elevated as a so-bad-it’s-good guilty pleasure? This issue will ask what it means to be a member of this vast audience, to personally identify with art that asks millions of others to do the same — or to reject pop, question it, and stay in the margins. Whatever our relationship to it, pop permeates nearly every facet of our lives, including, and of particular significance to this issue, our own creative output. But just how passive is our consumption? This issue will reevaluate pop for the streaming age, the social media age, and the age of a reality star president.