Mass Reproduction

For this week’s reading, it addresses popular culture through the critical approach. Unlike the functionalist approach, the critical approval focuses on the darker factors of popular culture. For this particular article, it will examine the effects of mass media on popular culture and how it shapes the way the audience perceives particular situations. In the David Grazian’s Mix It Up Chapter 3, “Welcome to the Machine: A Critical Approach to Popular Culture” will examine popular culture from the critical approach. It will address the foundation of the critical approach (49). It introduces Karl Marx’s idea about the ruling class and how they are basically the ruling material force of society (49). This reveals that the ideas of the ruling class are just the same as the ruling ideas that are created.

Benjamin stressed the Marxist democratization of art through digital reproduction, a media which allows for de-emphasizing the original work of art. Throughout the history of arts, particularly visual arts, we have revered the individual paintings created

The culture industry affects everything in today’s society. Adorno states, “The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry” (99). Everywhere people go, there are billboards, commercials, and advertisements that demand their attention. Before seeing a movie, one must sit through previews of other movies that may interest them, as the theater hopes that the moviegoer returns to watch another movie. In the culture industry, people no longer exist as individuals. They only exist as objects that increase the wealth of the big business owners that control this capitalistic society. Because no one contests the existence of the culture industry, the culture industry can continue to exist. About the film and radio industries, Adorno states, “They call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors’ incomes quell any doubts about the social necessity of their finished products” (95). Creating unique and groundbreaking films in today’s world is considered “risky,” and filmmakers would rather create sequels to films that were successful in the box office. People excitedly consume these sequels and the directors make huge profits, thereby ensuring yet another sequel to be made. Adorno also points out that the film and radio

“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer is a pivotal article in history that changed the way in which many communications scholars viewed media. Both authors were members of the Frankfurt School, a school of thought which looked further into Karl Marx’s theories about capitalism and the issues of mass production. Published in 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer revealed their beliefs that the media, much like the economy, is becoming mass produced, and is therefore turning people in society into media-consuming robots. Industrialization created work lives for people in which they would work on only one part of a larger machine. As a result, they felt less involved in the completion of the project as a whole, and therefore felt less pride in their jobs and their lives in general. Instead, these people turned to media and pop culture so that they would feel more fulfillment within their lives. Adorno and Horkheimer believed that these people had a reduced capacity for original thought because media is now force feeding them the ideas of what they can think and feel. This essay will prove that although Adorno and Horkeimer’s points were justified through the eyes of authors George Lipsitz, Lev Manovich, and Susan J. Douglas, there are still exceptions to their theories that they do not account for.

“The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry.” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 89)

Theodor W. Adorno, a German philosopher, claimed that popular music is a product of industrialisation within his critique of mass culture. Adorno contended in his criticism that ‘the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardised production of consumption goods" which is concealed under "the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretence of individualism’1. Adorno’s theory has come under scrutiny by scholars over time as a result of notable flaws. Roy Shuker states in Understanding Popular Music that Adorno’s undermined his own work in his ignorance towards the rise of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950’s, instead furthering in essays about Tin Pan Alley and jazz-orientated variations of it. 2 Theodor Adorno Meets The Cadillacs is an article by Bernard Gendron that discusses the implications of Adorno’s lie in technological advances tends to promote individuality of music styles. Max Paddison suggests in The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music that there is substance of value within Adorno’s theory that can be appropriated into a more advanced concept of analysing popular music. This essay will implore the question of how relevant Adorno’s philosophy remains within today’s culture of popular music.

Adorno argued, in regard to both cultural production and mass culture that Capitalism has: ‘hi-jacked’ art and its requirements of the market, this notion can also be applied to the ‘relationship’ between media/power and the elite, today. Thus, reliance needs (dependency) are fashioned in the minds of consumers of said culture by fresh forms of culture curating a set of conditions of dependency by the powerful. The aim of commercial ‘art, it goes on to argue, is to be presented without any critique, thus making its produce essentially ideological; the extra dominated interpretations of reality are reproduced, reinforced and strengthened through this.

According to Theodor W. Adorno in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, the culture industry is the entertainment business. “The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry” (1113). While people are consuming products from the entertainment manufacturers “with alertness even when the customer is distraught,” real life is not becoming indistinguishable from the movies (1113). The majority of consumers are able to distinguish products from the entertainment manufacturers such as movies, TV shows, radio and books from reality.

Benjamin’s death in 1940 at the age of 48, is rumored to be a suicide when the Naza’s took office, but is still a mystery. His ideas and concepts however, would live on for decades to come. Much of what he wrote about when discussing art came essentially after the development of photography and film. In his work, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin addresses his perception of the changes in art and the aesthetic experience congruent with societal changes. He writes with concern of how the great artworks are viewed after the introduction of photography and film. His idea of mechanical reproduction changed the art world as society knew it, particularly in how the public views artwork and the value of that work as more and more people are able to own, view and discuss it. This paper will specifically look at aspects of Benjamin’s groundbreaking essay and how educators can relate his ideas to the practices in their art classrooms.

Therefore, from these two Frankfurt theorists we have a different view of the culture and the culture industry. Benjamin focuses on the “democratization of culture” that is made available by the production of art while Adorno and Horkheimer argue the ways in which art become more linked to commercial exploitation. It can be suggested through the readings of Adorno and Horkheimer 's work that they seem to be eliciting the question of whether people believe everything that the culture tells them and trying to make sense of the distinct differences between the messages of the culture industry and the public’s realities thus creating an environment where autonomous independent individuals, who are able to think for themselves, can form.

Between the use of film or digital photography, film is the more effective method when looking for originality and creativity. With the adoption of digital photography, the younger generations, as well as the older and more current photographers are becoming lazy. These groups must recognize that the art of the photograph is being jeopardized by the digital camera and the camera phone. For the current photographers as well as amateur photographers, this essay will serve as testimony to film as well as other chemical methods, and how they shouldn’t be ignored, but preferred. The digital era has had a massive impact on the art world and all of its mediums, but for photography this impact has resulted in the removal of the human from the photograph making process. This intimate process is what makes it an art form. All of films imperfections and unique qualities, as well as its monetary value and scarcity are just a few factors that have made it so precious. To replace this entire process with a microchip is offensive and undermines the importance of the process that is needed to make a photograph. Anyone can take a picture but you must make a photograph, and this skill is being simplified to a digital camera. The impact of the digital era on photography has hindered the process of making a photograph; painting the art form obsolete in today’s society.

Mass Culture, all in all, is those profit-driven cultural products that are mass-produced for mass consumed by the mass society through mass media. For the reason that the aim of mass culture is to gain by satisfying the social desire of entertainment instead of expressing the ideas and feelings of the creators, the output is regarded as a “commodity” but not a “composition”. Mass Culture is also charged to be a “pseudo-culture”, it is not culture as a matter of fact.

In 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, members of the Frankfurt School who fled from the Nazi Germany to the USA, were publishing their seminal essay ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. Political critique, their thesis about the ideological domination of capitalism on cultural production is one that persists today and is regularly renewed (Mukerji & Schudson, 1991). Yet, since the first half of the twentieth century, evolutions have occurred within the ‘Culture Industry’, and while the theory – focusing primarily on the music and cinema industries – is still applicable to some features of contemporary ‘cultural industries’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2007), these changes require a contemporary reconsideration of it.

Adorno and Horkheimer suggest ideology as the reason dominant culture industries are able to sustain themselves. They argue that “The culture industry tends to make itself the embodiment of authoritative pronouncements, and thus the irrefutable prophet of the prevailing order” (Adorno and Horkheimer 17). Thus, we can think of these “authoritative pronouncements” as methods Hollywood employs to sustain its dominance. By proclaiming a certain set of ideas which convinces the public that no other authority or ideas exist otherwise, Hollywood mystifies and obfuscates all other traces of thought. It normalizes its manipulation of the public by ostracizing other values and ideas outside the predominant notions of standardization and mass production.

In the text Adorno and Horkheimer primarily focuses on the issue of art such movies, radio program and etc becoming a commodity and the fusing of the market and art areas. The criticism of the culture industry stems from the fact that for Adorno and Horkheimer culture held the answer for liberation, however the mass produced culture that they found in America was instead enslaving people. Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument regarding mass culture produced products and its effects and commoditization of art remain important to contemporary society because these issues have continued to have a negative effect on contemporary society this can be observed by analyzing contemporary mass culture products such as television, movies and the internet.