Thomas Hecken

The introduction of the term »populäre Kultur« (popular culture) marks a decisive break with the German intellectual past of the years before 1960. During this time a harsh critique of the »Massenkultur« (mass culture) ranked among the most important discourses of German columnists, literary authors and academic scholars. The new term »populäre Kultur« stems partly back to the positively used terms »popular« and »Popularität« of the romantic tradition (Herder, Schiller et al.). Especially many authors of the years 1980 ff. who use the term »populäre Kultur« quite frequently embrace the culture of the everyday life or the products of the (former) low culture in a much more complete way than their predecessors.

Die 2016 gegründete »Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift«, herausgegeben von der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, versteht sich als ein offenes Forum der kulturwissenschaftlichen Debatte, in dem historische wie gegenwartskulturelle The [...]

›Pop‹ often functions as an abbreviation of ›popular‹. If that is the case, ›pop‹ includes talk of ›simple,‹ ›catchy‹, ›vivid‹ and/or ›standardised‹, ›schematised‹ and/or ›charming‹, ›spectacular‹ artefacts as well as their ›lively‹, ›unmediated‹ or ›conditioned‹, ›passive‹, ›merely sensual‹ reception. This essay reconstructs precisely those approaches to a pop aesthetic, from Richard Hamilton, among others, to cultural studies and German-language pop discourse, that deviate from this and offer an independent position. Three areas of such pop aesthetics are examined in more detail: 1. determinations of individual pop arts and pop-specific value judgements, 2. forms¨ of not purely discursive pop aesthetics, 3. provisions for an overarching pop aesthetic. In the comprehensive inspection of corresponding presentations on pop music, pop art, pop literature and pop design, characteristics cited, such as superficiality and artificiality, are examined for their viability, deficits are identified and, in some cases, new proposals are made.

The article explains what is meant by ›ranked lists of the popular‹. ›List‹ is used here as a generic term. Rankings of the popular are, among other things, those representations that include the quantitatively determined data of voting records of very many people who are not identified as experts. Examples of such popular rankings include the results of political elections, opinion polls,music charts, book bestseller lists and trending topics. Such lists make a decisive contribution to the assertion of the popular. In this respect, the popular is conceptualized in a different way than in many current theories of popular culture, in which the quantitative dimension plays a lesser role. In the second part, the article looks at previous researchoncharts, rankings and lists and examineswhether their results can be used to assess the rankings of the popular.