Comment by sevensor
16 days ago
We've always liked crappy stuff. Try reading 1930s pulp. (Sci-fi, Westerns, adventure stories, detective novels, what have you.) It's almost all garbage, even if you can set aside the chauvinism of the age. The difference I see between then and now is that the dominant media outlets are elevating garbage as their premier product, where in the past they occasionally produced prestige works that went for highbrow appeal. It's not that the median has shifted down; if anything, it's slightly better garbage than it used to be. It's that there's doesn't seem to be anything at the top anymore.
Yeah I think sometime in the last 20 years it became very uncool to appear to be elitist about anything cultural. As a result there is no cachet in appearing to have elevated tastes and no stigma in liking trash. Personally that suits me as I like both Pulp and the Canon, for example. But on the other hand I think it is destructive for current writers who are doing anything remarkable as it usually does take tastemakers of some kind to bring their work to general attention.