Junk and Punk Aesthetics

Abstract

ture and significance of art for which long-established critical vocabulary and methods of evaluation no longer seem suitable. These recent studies address the issues of audience, text, and marketplace that have come increasingly under scrutiny by recent critical theory, especially that theory which treats art within postmodern culture. Greil Marcus, in Lipstick Traces, examines the message and aesthetics of punk music and its relation to previous radical programs, and Thomas Roberts, in An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, explores how even the most despised of genre writing-the paperback forms of science fiction, spy novels, pornography, detective writing, Westerns, and romances-provide readers with a sense of pleasure and mental stimulation through aesthetic that are basically different from those found in writing. These critics assume that contemporary art and fiction are evolving within a media-dominated culture and hence are challenging the traditional ways in which art circulates and functions: they address the issues of the definition of realism, of how meaning-production arises in fiction, of how artists working outside the usual framework of commercial and academic networks (and also outside linear, mimetic assumptions concerning causality, character development, and plot structures) are creating fiction and art that must be decoded and evaluated differently from previous art forms. Equally significant are some of their underlying assumptions about other tendencies associated with postmodernism. Both studies, for instance, examine the increasingly problematic distinction between pop culture and serious art, or between avant-garde art and mass culture, and seek to examine how the commodification and mass production of culture affects the producers and packagers of cultural commodities, the artists who create such commodities, and the audiences served by the culture industry. In a sense, then, Marcus and Roberts mean to assess the nature and significance of art for which longestablished critical vocabulary and methods of evaluation no longer seem suitable. What make these studies very different, however, are the authors' critical methodologies and how they apply these to materials and ideas so radically different in scope. Roberts uses