This was a very interesting article about how culture has been industrialized and marketed to us over the years, but I have one hang up with the article that I cant get over. In the beginning of the article, they argue that “films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce”. “Trash”? In an industry that run so smoothly that people hardly notice, how can we discern what is trash?
By using the word trash, Horkheimer and Adorno immediately distance themselves from me. When looking at the movie and music industry, of course we have to realize that there is a very visible bottom line. If a movie studio, an important mechanism in the culture industry, releases a movie knowing full well that it is trash and that people will willingly consume the trash then we cant call it trash anymore. Taste evolves with ideology and now as our culture is ruled by apathy, we can not get enough of what they refer to as “trash”.
“Amusement, free of all restraint, would be not only the opposite of art but its complimentary extreme. Absurdity in the manner of Mark Twain, with which the American culture industry flirts with from time to time, could be a corrective to art” but why cant art be amusement? I believe that there is a certain art to amusement and entertainment, an art that is absolutely connected with culture. As we discuss the culture industry and its productions, I cant help but think of Marx and the question of what came first, ideology or individual thought. We can ask the same with culture and art and which of those came first. To me, art is such an intangible force, but as I side with Marx on the previous question, art is definitely a product of the current collective conscious or ideology of the time.
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1 comment:
very good
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