The culture industry, perpetuates a uniform culture, enhanced and propagated by the media and is then funnelled down to the masses like a feeding tube, except there is no nutrition. Products of the culture industry, are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through. Art is no longer courted; instead, people looking to make a profit do careful research of demographics and target audiences, and everything that made art has been aborted in favour of high audience reception and money, prostituting itself and contaminating its audience. Three- and four-minute songs lack musical and lyrical and substantial variation. Common sense itself has been has been hijacked by the stupefaction which lies in the claim that advice which is valid every day, and which is therefore idiotic, needs the approval of the stars. The culture industry has eliminated any room for thought, imagination, or interpretation; because appointed role models have laid everything out in a format that a child could easily comprehend. An authentic counterculture is virtually inaccessible, because the culture industry has spread out and achieved a monopoly, even on the supposed rebellion, blinding its audience to any true alternative. Culture once hunted its audience like the noble stag, whereas the culture industry now farms its audience like brain-dead cattle. The masses have been stupefied into liking the same thing over and over and over and over again. The greatest danger of the culture industry is that people, caught up in mind-numbing repetition, forget its presence and its influence. - Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (1944)
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 14:09:10 +0000
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