Placing the Aesthetic in Popular Culture:
Quality, Value, and Beauty in Communication and Scholarship

An International Communication Association Preconference

Cosponsored by the Popular Communication, Philosophy of Communication, and Visual Communication Divisions

26 May 2011, Emerson College

For many within the correlate fields of media, cultural, and communication studies, art, beauty, and aesthetics are highly problematic, heavily loaded terms. Critical theory posited the evaluative schemas on which such terms rely as discursively constructed and as frequently laden with culturally chauvinistic politics, and cultural studies in particular offered a firm rejection of the notion that the study of culture should begin with a favorable judgment of the text in question.

Yet aesthetics never went away. Even if unaware, many scholars continued to select research projects based around judgments of a subject matter's aesthetic prowess or poverty. More importantly, though, the discourse of aesthetics, quality, and beauty never went away for audiences and the media industries, as seen in discussions of "quality television," for instance, or in the valorization of "independents" and "art house" production in film, in the debate regarding whether videogames are art that is currently heading to the U.S. Supreme Court (with the future of videogame regulation hanging in the balance), or in the continuing denigration of aesthetic forms associated with marginal groups, such as certain forms of hip hop.

The aesthetic in popular culture may even be at the center of significant cultural transformations associated with new media and the reconfiguration of existing mass media. For instance, do the commentary and rating options on popular Web 2.0 websites represent a democratization of aesthetic judgment, or even the creation of a participatory aesthetic "public sphere" based around open discussion, advice, and support? And to what extent are such developments paralleled (or exploited) by the rhetoric of natural talent and the apparent validation of audience opinion on TV shows like the Idol franchise? We in communication studies may not tackle aesthetics head on, but it is always there, whether as discourse, rumor, debate, or control mechanism.

This 1-day preconference will approach the place of aesthetics in popular communication studies. Treating it as a problematic, not as a given, the preconference will create room for vigorous debate about the actual and potential place of aesthetics in our scholarship. The point will not be to find yet more ways to romance the text, but to interrogate aesthetics and to advance popular communicative approaches to its observation and analysis. We will ask where one finds discussions of aesthetics and what they represent, but also consider possible ways that aesthetics might find its way into our scholarship in the future.