It's ok to go through 300 to laugh at homoeroticism, but not ok to discuss the points that art is trying to make when it oversimplifies?
My only problem with this is the cultural critic's insistence on assigning everything they enjoy with a complex intellectual meaning and significance. It's self-praise, in the guise of analysis, used to rationalize the sheer amount of time spent consuming popular products of the culture industry.
Isn't this insistence what we teach kids though? We make them read and analyze novels even when they have little context to put those ideas into. You can read too deeply into everything, even when it isn't the author's intent.
On the other hand, some of the things in popular culture are what teach us about what the world is like. For example, I would wager that more people are taught what guns are like by video games and movies, than the actual physical objects themselves. This means that there is some purpose to analysing popular products from a variety of angles. It might teach us new things about the world. We probably do it from the same few (political) angles too often though.
There is a reason to read for what it says to you, rather than what the author says or even what they say it says. The art means whatever it means to you.
Teachers often teach that very badly, but the lesson is buried in there. Discover what you like, then inquire about why you like it and how it does that.
It's not about teaching you about the world. It's about teaching you about yourself, and then about other people.
The problem is how expensive these products (especially the specific cases of books, AAA games and movies) are to produce, and monopolies on distribution. The messages that they communicate are the closest thing to actual direct mega-corporate speech that exists. The institutions who produce these things are the bad guys. Their primary messages are optimistic happy consumption to defy death, or cynical world-weathered resignation to unavoidable consumption.
All of this speech comes from like 10 world-spanning companies and everyone is on everyone else's board.
Books and indie games usually aren't much different, because they are imitative of the dominant content owners. A world of fanfic. And of course, in the case of books, the world has about 4 publishers that sell 80% of them.
The problem is how expensive these products (especially the specific cases of books, AAA games and movies) are to produce, and monopolies on distribution.
Books aren't expensive to publish like theatrically released movies and AAA games. According to the 2019 Publishers Weekly ranking of global publishers, Penguin Random House issues 15,000 titles a year with revenues of 3434 million Euros (2018). That puts cost-per-title well under $0.25 million whereas AAA games start at tens of millions per title. I don't know if ROI is similar but initial cost to bring a new work to market is much lower for a book.
Not to mention that, despite the terrible ways they manipulate it, Amazon's self-publishing programs are genuinely cheap and reasonably easy to use. And if you don't need to make money from your art, you can host it at any number of sites for free or your own for more time than money.
My only problem with this is the cultural critic's insistence on assigning everything they enjoy with a complex intellectual meaning and significance. It's self-praise, in the guise of analysis, used to rationalize the sheer amount of time spent consuming popular products of the culture industry.