Keeping It Real
"Aesthetics" and "populism" are contested concepts. The "real" part of the moniker need not be contested quite so bitterly. Most any conventional sense of the word is adequate to present purposes.
Seeing that the slang expression "keeping it real" indicates precisely the absence of corrupt and self-serving behavior in a group setting, it may well be the most apt among the candidates.
NOTES
" . . . keeping . . . "
Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (p. 73).
by very reason of its impersonality and standardization, a machine art, once it has achieved a high level of form, is not subject to endless variations: the main problem is to keep it at its original high level. Though the subjective arts often fall into stereotypes and fashionable molds, the fact is that man's inner life, when awakened, is inexhaustible; and repetition without variation and re-creation is fatal to the existence of the humane arts. This is not so with the arts of the machine. Here the type is the supreme achievement; for the sake of functional economy, for the sake of order and common use, the fewer new demands that are made, the better. The capital danger in the arts of the machine is misplaced creativity, in other words trying to make the machine take over the functions of the person.
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