The Golden Age of Mediocrity

There was a time when such extravagant self-praise by musicians would have elicited stinging ridicule from angry young rock critics of the Lester Bangs school. These days, though, when having a star on a magazine cover is deemed crucial to newsstand success, there doesn't seem to be much danger of that happening. As Robert B. Ray, head of the University of Florida's film studies program and a singer/guitarist in the 1980s post-punk band the Vulgar Boatmen, has theorized, the aging cadre of rock reviewers tends to suffer from a malaise called "overcomprehension." That is, they effusively praise acts they don't understand, because they're afraid of knocking something that may turn out to be the next big thing.

In Hollywood, auteur theory, which views a film primarily as the work of a single artist, has helped push pretension to great extremes. "Filmmaking really is a group enterprise," explains former Premiere magazine editor and film historian Peter Biskind, author of "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film." "To call a film 'wonderful' or 'brilliant' or some other adulatory adjective is one thing, but to say that it's a work of genius implies that it springs wholly from the mind of one person, which isn't the way it happens."

Another convenient way to establish one's credential as a genius is to attract legions of college faculty members apparently scouring for fresh scholarly subjects. Take, for example, the 1993 anthology, "The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory," in which scholars ponder such issues as the symbolic messages conveyed by the singer's stage costuming during her pointy bra period. One contributor notes that "Madonna, as the subject of critical analysis, seems to require the elaborate conjuncture of a whole host of grandiose themes." A 2003 doctoral thesis actually placed her cultural significance as a dancer on a par with Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham.

Technology deserves a great deal of the blame for our cultural morass. Increasingly sophisticated computers and software make it easier for authors, visual artists, movie directors and pop musicians to churn out ever greater quantities of work, while doctoring and/or blurring defects to conceal shortcomings. In a recent article in Rolling Stone, for example, rock music producer Butch Vig demonstrated how a software program called Pro Tools can fashion, from scratch, an entire 35-track pop song on a Macintosh G-4.