In this article, the author discusses Richard Shusterman's defense of popular culture and intends to show that the entertainment industry has a dark side which Shusterman tends to ignore. Richard Shusterman is a pragmatist aesthetician who promotes art as an integral part of the ever-changing stream of life, believing that popular culture provides ways of giving art a place in everyday existence. Just like his predecessor John Dewey, Shusterman stresses man's active involvement with art. He maintains that the entertainment industry speaks on behalf of the common man. Shusterman has not only been influenced by Dewey, but also by a host of other thinkers. One of them is the well-known French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who famously maintained that the elite distinguished itself from the multitude by having a different taste; they called their own taste "refined" and the taste of the masses "vulgar." The elite stresses form, not function, and asserts that only a formalistic approach to art is legitimate; focusing on its function in everyday life is vulgar. The elite looks down upon popular culture and commerces with art in an intellectualist fashion. Shusterman counters these claims and takes on highbrow criticism of popular art which he treated roughly in terms of six charges: the ones of (a) spuriousness; (b) passivity; (c) superficiality; (d) the lack of autonomy; (e) the lack of form; and (f) the lack of creativity. While Shusterman's criticism of charges is quite convincing, he ignores an important charge, which the author labels as the charge of danger--that popular culture, especially visual entertainment, could be a danger to education, high culture, and civilization in general. In this article, the author defends this charge by systematically responding to three of Shusterman's explicit and implicit assertions: (1) popular culture is rather a bringer of culture than a threat to it; (2) since popular culture is no threat to culture, it is by implication not a threat to higher culture; and (3) popular culture strengthens communal living. (Contains 34 notes.)