Mixing us a defense of mediocre corporate culture that blands out anything interesting that could give people ideas with a populist stance is a Republican maneuver. The big corporations who shovel this shit are perfectly fine at defending themselves, thank you very much, and don’t need ordinary people with a phony concern for “the poor” to do it for them. Wal-Mart is not “the poor”. Some people who shop at Wal-Mart are, and pretty much everyone who gets abused by their employment practices is.

I would expand that to include all institutional cultures whether corporate, religious, or governmental institutional centered “art”. As several other commenters have already commented, institutional centered art tends to not only be stale, but could easily become an unintentional parody of itself as shown by much of the Maoist centered artwork of the Cultural Revolution.

What’s more funny is that one’s socio-economic class has little actual correlation with good taste as shown by many upper/upper-middle class American college students who have embraced Cultural Revolution and Maoist art wholesale since the 60’s.

This was especially prevalent at my undergrad college where many of them had little understanding of why someone they considered to be so admirable was regarded by many who experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand or had family who had regarded him with deep antipathy and the “revolution” as a serious waste for their society.

” Heh, every time I hear that damn song I scream, “STEER INTO THE SKID, YOU STUPID BITCH! STEER INTO THE SKID!!!!!”

The great travesty of the current evangelical contributions to culture is they are not designed to actual contribute to art or culture but to supplant it. This music, literature and art is designed to allow the evangelical community the allusion of participating in the world without ever leaving the small womb defined by their beliefs.

When a young teen trapped in the fundie mindset that non-Christian music was evil, I had to look very hard to find groups like this or be condemned to the hell that was Amy Grant. And their vocals and melodies are, to me, eerie and interesting; there are other fringey Christian groups out there that have the same effect, merging true belief with some really sort of dark and sad inflections. Much like country music, actually, in that it is a rather limited artform that can be transcended by contact with artistic truths about love, sadness, and confusion.

And shlock is everywhere. Americans may be more consumerist than some cultures, but we certainly don’t have a monopoly on questionable aesthetics.

http://www.getraptureready.com/blog/2008/04/hey-little-girl-want-some-test.php

Art springs up everywhere, even through Soviet and Nazi dictates (I am Cuba, for example.) Even in the Slate article linked, the Christian “Punk’d” had a joke more daring than I’ve ever seen on the original show, or at a million smug comedy acts on the Lower East Side.

That said, the prospect that there’s a Christian Nick Hornby knock-off deeply horrifies me.