By Diego Cano Gómez
What are the relations between industry, art and culture?
The way that capitalist enterprises view culture and art, is similiar to a cow which they can milk until it starts giving blood instead of the desired product, in other words, the focus of big companies towards art, is getting the biggest ammount of economical benefit from it, without really caring or trying to respect the culture or the art itself which they are benefiting from.
This companies can't view art and culture as forms of expression made with an aesthetic, critical or historical function, they only view them as gold mines from where they can steal resources in order to create mediocre forms of entertainment than can be consumed easily and commodify cultures.
Art and culture is turned into mere souvenirs by companies whose thrist for profit devours the original meanings and cultural values, reducing them to a simple product with images that appeal to the simplest emotions, either by the recognition of an object of pop culture that is continiously bombarded into our lives, or because it wakes our most basic feelings like empty hapiness.
This is common in post-modern times, where artworks are secularized and sold as products, one of the most common examples could be seen through the extreme commercialization of pieces like ''Mona Lisa'', or Munch's ''Scream'', which have been vitims of a process of commodification through pop-culture.
''Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes.'' (Horkheimer, Adorno, Schmid Noerr & Jephcott, 1947)
This forms of kitsch products may seem inoffensive and satiric, but they can be quite dangerous to society as they can replace art forms that actually have cultural and historical importance, which can make us undersatnd or think in different ways that can enlighten our view towards our evironment.
But the process that we can consider far more threatening to cultural heritage, is cultural appropiation, as done by many media companies, but specially by Disney, grabbing classic tales, such as ''Alice's adevntures in Wonderland'' (Carroll 1865), and turning it into a kitch version that appropiates it's economical rights, making money of a cultural object that is property of everyone.
Is there a place for subversion inside the cultural industry?
The gap there is to fight against the culture industry is miniscule, as it is a stream with so much power that pushes oppsite flows of current into its hegemonical direction.
Culure industry adapts itself to the counter-hegemonic movements that may appear, incorporating them into the industrial plan , to the point of even making benefit of them. The spontaneity of this movements is now lost and incorporated into the system, stripped away of its revolutionary potential, a quote from Adorno himself explains this phenomena in detail:
''In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own.'' Adorno, T. W., & Rabinbach, A. G. (1975).
What Adorno describes as ''catharsis'' is a pheneomena by which a hegemonical power portrays values that go against itself in order to numb the expectator's urge of revolution by selling them their own ideology and making them feel like they are actively fighting against those power structures when, in reality, they are just consuming their product and contributing to their enrichment and empowering by making us submit to their reinterpretation of our own values and revolutions.
An example of this process can be seen through Hollywood movies criticising capitalism and society. Films such as ''Joker'' (2019) show anti-capitalist values that go against companies like the big studios that produce this media.
Do you agree with the ideas of Horkheimer and Adorno about the cultural industries?
I find the ideas of Horkheimer, Adorno and the Frankfurt in general, very forward to its time, as nowadays more than ever, they are the perfect tool to understand how mass media is evolving and how to develop some ways of fighting against them, as they didn't really had the ability to theorize a solution. This ideas are the key to be conscious about how we must protect our cultures and art forms, and to understand the amount of power big media companies actually have, as they have the ability to shape our actions and reality into something that keeps benefiting their position in society.
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