DBA123, post class 3/24

“The concept of genuine style becomes transparent in the culture industry as the aesthetic equivalent of power.” (47)

I thought this quote from today’s class was particularly interesting. In class, our explanation of the quote was along the lines of, which once something new, or original, is produced, there will soon be replications of it. I thought that this quote and our clarification of it related to some of Lyotard’s ideas. Lyotard believed that nothing was truly modern; he didn’t think that Avant Garde was truly possible. This could be interchangeable with ‘genuine style.’ That no style is actually authentic, it came from somewhere else. Speaking about style in terms of fashion, how many times when we look through magazines have we read “The 80’s are making a comeback,” or whatever decade it is of the season. Moving onto the second part of the quote and relating it to Lyotard’s concepts, it says that style has become equivalent with power. Lyotard says that products value depends on what someone else will pay for it. In class we discussed how these ‘genuine styles’ soon become mass-produced, people paying to replicate the original they had seen.
I thought this quote, when relating it to Lyotard, illustrated how our culture depends on images or media to tell us what to do next. If we take Lyotard’s stance on what is or isn’t modern and apply it to the first half of this quote, we are saying that nothing really is genuine. If we take his definition of power and value and apply it to the second half of the quote, we are saying we give power to something that wasn’t ever authentic. When the media stops showing us images of what the next big thing is, is that when we stop placing value upon it as well?