Amanda D. Post # 8

Amanda Dhillon

1. The danger that Adorno seems to find with the increased homogenization of the “culture industry” is the consequential lack of individuality and creativity in art and in the society that views it, as well as the diminished value of art due to the growth of commercialized mass culture. Concerning fine art/ the arts, the increasing mass culture industry causes a deprecation of value and imagination in art pieces as “traces of commercialism” appear “at the expense of the meaningfulness of the work” (Adorno 214). The culture industry establishes a homogenized, structured pattern of requirements for a work to have in order for it to be widely well-accepted. For example, in order for a Hollywood film to be successful, it should have an identifiable protagonist as well as antagonist, and despite how cunning or resourceful the oppressor is, the protagonist should end up as the heroic savior after struggling through the obstacles (not to dangerous or complex, mind you, as everyone should be able to follow the plot), and the outcome should be happy, thus causing all “tension” to be “superficially maintained” and therefore lose its influence (Adorno 216). People begin to expect everything before it happens. It is this homogenization that Adorno recognizes as a problem because it takes the true creativity and ingenuity/imagination out of a piece of art so that it caters to the mass audience. And sub-sequentially, the audience becomes less individual in turn. The “output [of popular culture products] has increased to such an extent that it is almost impossible for anyone to dodge them,” (Adorno 215) causing “automatized reactions” which “weaken the forces of individual resistance” (Adorno 216). People feed into and want more and more of this manufactured, “culture industry” produced art because it is easy and pleasant, which simultaneously, as Adorno feared, results in “intellectual effort” that is “lowered” (Adorno 218) across the middle classes that then become the mass audiences. This growing lack of creativity and subsequent deprecation of the value of art as is becomes sucked into the homogenized mass culture is the most stifling problem with the expanding culture industry. Not to mention, the effects are also felt in fine art, where the value of art is diminished. People can no longer understand the “hidden message” (Adorno 219) of the pieces because of the changing values because of the emphasis that is drawn to the very overt and shallow messages of popular culture “art”/ commodities, which promote the values given to the audience-consumers by the industry and that they take to be true as it is shown to them. Due to this integrated thinking, the value of art that questions values or raises new ideas falls as people do not receive it as well as they do their mass produced art. This kind of homogenized thought and behavior is characteristic of “a totalitarian nature” (Adorno 222), which would be dangerous to any society that considers itself democratic, and since the culture industry creates this, its growth and expansion is problematic. On a less macro scale, these popular culture standards create and foster stereotypes in society. As the culture products become more and more fitted to the regulations and requirements set by the audience and the producer, everyone begins to expect what happens next: certain stimuli create a mental response that when A happens, the B will always follow, and the stereotype is created and reinforced. Because this thought process becomes so ingrained the viewers, the danger is that they may come to expect that there are no real surprises in reality, either, and that if A happens, the result will always be B, or that people who do C are all D’s (Adorno 229-234). Because of these effects on the people and on the arts, then, the increase of the homogenized culture industry can be quite stifling and potentially dangerous to society.
2. It would seem that with the advent of new technologies and consumer groups, the culture industry has continued to grow. There is more homogenization and commercialization in popular culture than before, and more and more of these popular culture products are being created to appeal to specific target audiences. For example, so many new bands continue to appear all over the popular music scene, and most of them are tailored to fit in with and appeal to a given type of consumer audience. They are made to dress considerably similarly and sound almost the same; many of these are being molded into what will fit into one of the currently most popular genres, “alternative” rock, in hopes that they will be taken up by the growing target audience that listens to this particular style of music. Also, new technologies attribute to the growing culture industry. EBay and other online stores now have programs that remember what a costumer last purchased and will bring up several similar items the next time he or she logs onto the site. Similarly, Google Video will make recommendations for a viewer based on the types of online movie clips he or she watched the last time he or she visited. This increased effort to reach the consumer and tempt him or her to purchase more and more shows an increase in the reach of the culture industry. It is tailoring itself toward more numerous and specific consumer groups in the hope of expanding profits and simultaneously providing for more thorough homogenization of people and products.
3. Formulaic culture industry products are far less creatively and freely produced than a piece of fine art. In creating the culture industry product, the artist “has to follow the objective requirements of his product much more than his own urges of expression,” (Adorno 226) keeping the piece in within the confines of what the consumer-audience will want to see. There are “set patterns” in the culture industry that the artist who produces for it must keep to, patterns which “reduce to a minimum the range of any kind of artistic self-expression,” (Adorno 226) but cause a product to be successful with its target consumer group. On the other hand, art that is freely created “can never be boiled down to some unmistakable ‘message,’” (Adorno 221) but has ambiguity and imagination and even questions the traditional “messages” projected onto society by culture industry products. The “rigid,” “superimposed…layers” that make up the message in mass produced, culture industry products are much less complex and more shallow than those of “autonomous art” whose “layers are much more thoroughly fused” (Adorno 221). The difference between these two types of art seems so important to Adorno because that is what defines the difference between individuality and imagination and the mass mindset. That which is freely created is democratic, while that which is a mass-produced product of the culture industry serves only to homogenize thought and action in people and in art, creating the basic foundation of authoritarian ideology. An example of freely created and imaginative art is Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians, which does not contain the required artistic or stylistic aspects that are pressed upon pieces made for the mass consumer-audience, but is rather created from the artists own imagination using his own style and artistic self-expression. Conversely, an example of a culture industry product would be the Fox Network’s television series House, which contains all of the elements of a program built according to the specs of a given target audience. It has moments of suspense and an intriguing sub-plot to keep people interested, likeable (or at least, interesting and sarcastically humorous) characters who do not always get along (and because of the occasional conflict created between them, one of the characters will learn a “valuable lesson”), and an ultimate conflict or problem that is finally resolved or solved by the genius Dr. House after the close-but-not-quite attempts at a solution by the foil characters, his medical team. Both of these exemplify the differences between the freely created art and that which is fashioned according to specifications of a mass-audience.

Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians: http://www.artquotes.net/masters/picasso/picasso_3musicians.jpg

Joe K. Post 7

Joe Kelly

"Monkey see, monkey do" has been a popular argument among conservatives in American politics for quite some time now, and they've certainly been effective in convincing the public. It has gotten to the point that our cultural interests are now simply assumed by media outlets to have a significant contributing effect on our actions: after the Columbine shootings, their was an outcry against Marilyn Manson when it was found that he was a staple of the killers' CD collections; their have been a slew of violent teenage crimes attributed to the imitation of both wrestling and violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto; and of course, there were the congressional debates about NEA funding and Robert Mapplethorpe. The strength of the causal connection between what we see in popular culture and do ourselves may be debated; however, it seems to be a rather one-sided debate these days.

The growing consensus on this question certainly had an effect on the Mapplethorpe case. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that it was the central issue of the debates. The question of funding was a red herring: NEA funding constitutes a miniscule percentage of the budget, nothing at all when compared with military spending. Still, disputing the allocation of NEA funds allowed politicians to dispute what was, in reality, their central point: will the creation of this art or similar to art have a negative effect on our nation's morals? This question, itself seems to be based on the dispute over the meaning of these works.

To those who wish to ban these works, just the depiction of actions of a sexual nature serves as advocacy, or at least tacit encouragement, of the acts portrayed. To the other side of the debate, the dynamic between visual stimulus and action is not quite so simple. One may look to a wealth of historical evidence to see that not all artistic portrayal is positive. Photos of the horrors war and of poverty, for instance, rarely aim to assign positive connotations to their subjects. Even when a portrayal of circumstances is not decidedly negative, it will not have such a straightforward impact on society as many would believe.

Certainly, images have an effect on people that is more visceral, and in many ways, deeper than that created by text. Though written ideas may have a higher capacity for sophistication, people do not always grasp their abstraction in a practical sense until they see them in the concrete, with their own eyes. Images serve to do just that. However, that does not mean that their messages make such an incredibly profound connection with the minds of individuals that they are automatically accepted as fact.

Art, like other mediums, should put forth two messages. One is its essential purpose, specific to an individual work, the meaning that the artist wished to attribute to it. The other is present in all art, and that message is that its first meaning, which the artist intends to put forth, should be evaluated by the viewer, in terms of the context of the viewer's world. Often, the art aims to even challenge this context, and if it does make such an attempt, the viewer should be willing to critically evaluate that work's claims. It is, in fact, this constant evaluation of not just the art, but the world around us, that is essential; for if we are unwilling to examine the context that form our beliefs, how are we to know whether our evaluations, based on these beliefs, are correct?