Page 88 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Theodor Adorno and the culture industry 73
his dismissal of the popular culture has been refuted in numerous
individual instances, this rather misses the real target of his scorn
which was the inherently manipulative content of low art. His account
of the culture industry acknowledges that high art may also be
manipulated for commercial purposes but it is not created for this
purpose at the very outset of the creative process. The contemporary
mediascape contains many examples of this misuse of high art
including the use of operas as advertising sound tracks for products
ranging from Guinness to aftershave. It is a complex area of debate
whether high art even remains possible in a society that has become
so commodified but Adorno’s high/low distinction is based upon
the fact that at least high art has the potential to produce non-
commodified outcomes while low art contains commodity values
4
within its very development structure, or creative DNA if you will.
Adorno’s criticism of the culture industry is based upon the
undermining of human autonomy that occurs as the historically
unprecedented result of the combined effects of new media tech-
nologies in which culture is reproduced and commodified in ways
not previously possible and the fact that this technical reproduction
of culture is systematically based upon a vulgar consideration of profit.
Adorno’s cultural account thus builds directly upon the critical
implications of Benjamin’s account of mechanical reproduction and
the shift this represents from a quantitative increase to qualitative
change – a point further pursued in the next chapter’s exploration
of McLuhan’s work. It should be emphasized that commercial
considerations in art are not new; composers admired by Adorno
such as Beethoven and Mozart were not averse to making money
from their art, and glories of ‘high’ Western culture such as the
Sistine Chapel were only possible through the patronage of rich
merchants. What was new according to Adorno, was the manner in
which the formal possibilities of the work of art were pre-inscribed
with commercial concerns. The most immediate manifestation of this
was the substitutability of the part and the whole and the reduction
in artistic tension that this created.

The part and the whole

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘low art is the ‘social bad
conscience of serious art’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 132).
Adorno also describes how ‘high’ and ‘low’ works of art: ‘Both bare
the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change … Both
are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do
not add up’ (Theodor Adorno, Letter to Walter Benjamin, 18th
March 1936, in Jameson 1980: 123). The first part of the statement
refers to the notion that in a capitalist society the possibility of high

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