ABSTRACT
The denigration of popular art or mass culture seems particularly compelling since it is widely endorsed by intellectuals of violently different socio-political views and agendas. It provides a rare instance where right-wing reactionaries and Marxian radicals join hands and make common cause. It is difficult to oppose such a powerful coalition of thinkers by defending popular art. One of the most common and unquestioned complaints against popular art is that it involves no aesthetic challenge but instead requires and induces passivity of response. Popular arts such as rock suggest a radically revised aesthetic with a joyous and boisterous return of the somatic dimension which philosophy has long repressed to preserve its own hegemony. The effortlessness and shallowness of popular art is often linked to its lack of formal complexity. Inadequacy of form is one of the most common and damning indictments of popular art, and one for which Pierre Bourdieu provides a powerful argument.
