This is most of a the chapter called The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Its not as heavy as it sounds and I feel fits quite well with Warhol's notion of mass production, and the comodification of Art and celebritisation of Artist could be seen as an extension of a self propagating system of illusionary choices (e.g. if your starving or are coerced into believing you are starving, and your captor offers you 3 different kinds of S#!T to eat, you're going to go for the best tasteing/least offensive one and maybe even potentially feel somewhat grateful at the diverse range... But really, it is all still S#!T). (I am prone to dramatic over simplification.) To tell the truth this chapter makes me really angry and kind of hate myself for doing a visual arts degree. It does how ever make you think, if someone like Warhol used art as the medium to reveal to the masses the mechanisms of commercial trickery and manipulation which afflicts them, and became a house hold name by doing so. Does that mean art in cases such as Hurst, the Chapman brothers, pretty much anyone in the satchi collection and really most contemporary artist affiliated with any major institution be it public or private are, a simple and effective way of paying lip-service to a supposed alternate point of view (within reason and of course share holder expectations (bill this mean you, you dirty old bugger), has art become the seditious descent your having when you're not having real descent? is it I can't believe its not social revolution? A two bird one stone where "radical" opinions can be voiced in a language concocted in university as to baffle all but the indoctrinated few giving the politicians and CEOs the ability to point to the artists on the pay role in answer to questions of the freedom of the individual and expression, and the ruling elite get the joy of hanging distilled convoluted irony on there walls which will only ever appreciate in value?
Much more of a soap box then I meant to get on sorry I'm not actually a balshy leftist ideologue.
http//:www.marxist.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
I guess that's the beauty of modern day art (thanks to the art pioneers of the 20th Century) - you can make art from anything, and make it into anything (industry wise). And perhaps we are in need of a new art revolution against the commercialism and your lip-service paying fellows...? But then I guess it comes down to what is art and what does being an artist really mean (we had a great discussion of this and where art is going to go in the future in a tut last week)?? Can not a urinal signed by Duchamp be called art for its then unconventional and unorthodox expression, just as much as Hurst's diamond skull? Perhaps it is a reflection on society's never ending lust for materialism and industrialism just as much as Duchamp displayed the impressions of dada and surrealism in his 'Fountain'. It is slightly ironic that the original 'Fountain' was lost and now replicas only exist.. But is it not a right in this country to have the freedom of individual expression? I myself think that art is seeping into the everyday lives of people more and more since the turn of the century, and we are about to experience a creative boom in the concept of art and society's definition of art (once more!)...?
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