Pop culture at its best and worst
According to Martha Bayles in an article in the Wilson Quarterly, "The most serious problem facing popular culture: the democratization, now on a global scale, of what I call "perverse modernism." To the familiar vices of popular culture--notably, vulgarity and kitsch--perverse modernism has added a new twist: a radically adversarial stance toward society, morality, and art itself. That stance has gone from being the property of a tiny avant-garde a century ago to being part of the cultural mainstream today.