Theodor W. Adorno: The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, creative industries, critical media studies, critical theory, cultural production, culture industry, Frankfurt school, mass media, popular culture
“The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno’s thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by his many detractors. In today’s world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno’s work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.”
Editor J. M. Bernstein
Publisher Routledge, 2001
ISBN 0415253802, 9780415253802
210 pages
Key terms: fascist, mass music, virme, culture industry, mass media, Dialectic of Enlightenment, mass culture, ego ideal, Adorno, acmally, critical theory, jazz, reified, psychoanalysis, astrology, Simone Weil, Freud, Erich Fromm, Gillian Rose
PDF (updated on 2013-6-11)
Comment (1)Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, Anya Lewin (eds.): Economising Culture: On ‘The (Digital) Culture Industry’ (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · culture industry, digital culture, economy
“The interaction between culture and economy was famously explored by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer by the term ‘Kulturindustrie’ (The Culture Industry) to describe the production of mass culture and power relations between capitalist producers and mass consumers. Their account is a bleak one, but one that appears to hold continuing relevance, despite being written in 1944. Today, the pervasiveness of network technologies has contributed to the further erosion of the rigid boundaries between high art, mass culture and the economy, resulting in new kinds of cultural production charged with contradictions. On the one hand, the culture industry appears to allow for resistant strategies using digital technologies, but on the other it operates in the service of capital in ever more complex ways. This publication, the first in the series, uses the concept of the culture industry as a point of departure, and tests its currency under new conditions.”
Contributors: Carbon Defense League & Conglomco Media Conglomeration | Adam Chmielewski | Jordan Crandall | Gameboyzz Orchestra | Marina Grzinic | Brian Holmes | Margarete Jahrmann | Esther Leslie | Marysia Lewandowska & Neil Cummings |Armin Medosch | Julian Priest & James Stevens | Raqs Media Collective | Mirko Tobias Schäfer | Jeremy Valentine | The Yes Men
Publisher: Autonomedia, 2004
DATA browser series, 1
Creative Commons License
ISBN 1570271682
256 pages
PDFs (updated on 2016-12-12)
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