When the status of elite culture changed and the barriers between elite and popular culture became increasingly porous, the dominant cultural paradigm happened to be modernism. Aesthetic and intellectual principles of modernism then filtered “down” into popular culture and were adopted by jazz and rock musicians, filmmakers, designers, and most recently digital media producers. A dialogue between elite modernism and popular culture had been going on throughout the twentieth century, but it became more productive in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, when modernism was being superseded in the art community itself, a kind of “popular modernism” began to thrive in the larger media culture.  Chapter 2 explores popular modernism through a series of examples from music, film, and digital media. 

Popular modernist design

Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone at MacWorld 2007.  Jobs is in some sense the last of the great popular modernist. 

Popular music and modern formalism

Bill Haley & His Comets, "Rock Around The Clock" (1955) 

 The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Comparing this album and its reception to the Bill Haley and His Comets 12 years earlier illustrates the stylistic evolution of rock music from "mere" popular music to popular modernist "art."

Popular modernist avant-garde

Marshall McLuhan interviews John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 19969. In part through the influence of the performance artist Yoko Ono, Lennon came to see how to use his fame as a Beatle to define a popular version of the political avant-garde.

The apple commercials

Apple 1984 Super Bowl Commercial Introducing Macintosh: Why 1984 won't be like 1984

Once again, Apple's Think Different ad campaign beginning in 1997 associated Apple computers with the key trope of the avant-garde: revolutionary thinking that defies tradition.

From Mechanical Robots to Artificial Intelligence

Maria, the robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) represent the era of mechanization.

By the time of Kubrick's 2001 (1968), the robot is fully disembodied or rather Hal's body is a bank of computer chips.

Popular modernist kitsch

The original Star Trek series: from its costumes to its utopian world view, this is modernism filtered through 1960s sensibility. 

The contemporary series Star Trek Discovery is just as kitsch but no longer seems so, because it represent nostalgia (for the earlier days of science fiction) rather than a faith in technological future.