The study of it is often silly and trivial, because it generally rests on characterizing the output of a very few corporations [*] with arbitrary, associative observations, then declaring that those observations tell us something interesting about the consumers of the material i.e. everyone. This is silly.
The rest is people competing on effusively praising of some obscure pocket of pop culture, with the aim of remarketing it with the academic as the (paid) authority. That's trivial.
I have to say that it's a bad sign that only defenses one can come up with of an academic field of study is that it's also a part of "this civilization", and that everyone who dismisses it's importance is just trying to impress people. Which makes them even sillier than Madonna studies, I guess, because trying to impress people by not talking nonsense is actually bad and a sign of insecurity.
[*] I remember when Ben Bagdikian was warning us that only 50 corporations determined the majority of what we read and watched. Now you could get the men who get a veto over most of what we see and say to fit inside a medium-sized bathroom. I resent cultural critics trying to diagnose me based on their financial incentives.
First by providing a lighter course subject these courses are often a fun intro to the field of study that can get students more interested in more traditional subjects in the field.
Secondly, Limited cultural centers is exactly a reason to study it because everything is controlled by those corporations and it’s impossible to understand modern society without it. Should we throw away most of the masterworks of the renaissance because they were funded by the Medicis? Should we throw away medieval European art because of influence by Catholicism? Even though those corporations control everything individual artists still have voices even if it’s mediated by power structures. If say in a hundred years a professor wanted to offer a course covering the late 20th century and early 21st century culture not including artifacts produced by those corporations would be incomplete at best. An analysis of modern culture needs to start somewhere and why not something like Madonna or Buffy that students can personally connect with?
Now I’m fully sympathetic to arguments stating it’s too modern to have that objective eye since our analysis will be rooted in the same cultural frame that’s mediated by extreme corporate power. But even that has value.
No, the mistake is trying to understand these artifacts independently of the corporations. It is impossible to understand the artifacts without understanding of the corporations. The art cannot stand alone.
The art cannot stand alone, but the relevant part is the audiences and what they make of the art, the fan subculture(s) and what they build on top of it - in contrast with that, the corporations which made them are far less relevant.
You're just letting "relevant" do the heavy lifting of your rationale. It's a poor argument.
What the audiences make of the art is contingent on the social mores and cultural attitudes of the time - which depend on the socio-political-economic material forces that operate on cultural strata. This is why concepts like commodity fetishism, corporate ideology, and so forth become critical in studying pop cultural phenomena. If you take such a class and don't learn that it is a social studies course in disguise, then you've learned nothing. It's not just merely scholarship about aesthetics and whatever the audience thinks. So the risk here is that these classes are taught wrong. These courses ought to be even more difficult than STEM classes because they require sociology, political and economic theory, philosophy, and so forth, involving open-ended issues and problems about human society. But for some reason (another can of worms) cultural studies is perceived as an "easy" program for academically weaker students to pursue.
It sounds like you’ve never taken one of these types of classes then. Madonna studies or Buffy studies is not 3 hours a week of why “like a virgin is the best madonna song”. It’s usually analysis of the cultural context and history. Maybe the profs angle isn’t capitalism maybe it’s feminism, maybe it’s race but I assure you there’s depth to it. Unless of course it’s a course on how to write pop music or tv or something more skills based.
Quite the opposite, I've read academic papers on critical theory and related subjects. I have an advanced training in a STEM discipline but as an undergrad I took electives at UC Berkeley, a highly regarded place for studying critical theory. Those humanities courses set the stage for my own philosophical/political inclinations as a graduate student, as well as later on in my life.
So it is with those readings and my own academic background that it is worth pointing out that critical theory itself criticizes the social role of these college classes and the way they are taught. I'm not the first pro critical theorist reader to do so--these issues are raised and debated within these fields by professors / within the scholarship itself. A mainstream example is Slavoj Zizek, but he is by no means the only one.
It is the fact that you've either taken or taught these courses that I find your subtly uncritical "assurance" to be superficial and lack a deeper awareness of the positionalities of cultural studies in general. If you have done a substantial amount of reading, then you'd at least know exactly what I mean by the above and would not have written the your reply that way.
The rest is people competing on effusively praising of some obscure pocket of pop culture, with the aim of remarketing it with the academic as the (paid) authority. That's trivial.
I have to say that it's a bad sign that only defenses one can come up with of an academic field of study is that it's also a part of "this civilization", and that everyone who dismisses it's importance is just trying to impress people. Which makes them even sillier than Madonna studies, I guess, because trying to impress people by not talking nonsense is actually bad and a sign of insecurity.
[*] I remember when Ben Bagdikian was warning us that only 50 corporations determined the majority of what we read and watched. Now you could get the men who get a veto over most of what we see and say to fit inside a medium-sized bathroom. I resent cultural critics trying to diagnose me based on their financial incentives.