Page 51 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 41
bourgeois order. Art, that is, belonged to the ‘second dimension’. It embodied a
vision of an alternative to existing social relationships and, in doing so, kept
alive the concept of transcendence. It was, in short, subversive.
Within the social and cultural fabric of monopoly capitalism, however, art is
said to have been deprived of its oppositional value. It has been tamed by being
made a part of the established order. In part, this was viewed as a by-product of
the nature of commodity exchange inasmuch as, concerned only with exchange
values, a market economy is able to harness to its own purposes even those use
values which are ostensibly opposed to it. Thus, just as Che Guevera is good for
the poster business and Maoism generates a new fashion in headwear, so art—
even the most subversive art—may be good for business, deprived of its critical
value in being reduced to the level of a mere means for the self-reproduction of
capital. I recall a particularly telling example of this in the form of an
advertisement, inserted by Lloyds Bank in The Times in 1974, which consisted
of a full-page colour reproduction of Matisse’s Le Pont beneath which there
appeared the legend: ‘Business is our life, but life isn’t all business’. Profoundly
contradictory, what was ostensibly opposed to economic life was thus made to
become a part of it, what was separate became assimilated, as any critical
dimension which might once have pertained to Matisse’s painting was eclipsed
by its new and unsolicited function as an advertisement for the wares of finance
capital.
More generally the Frankfurt theorists contended that, quite contrary to the
optimism of such liberal-pluralists as Edward Shils, the media made the world of
serious culture more widely accessible only at the price of depriving it of its
critical substance. For the media, by bringing culture into everyday life,
wrenched it from the tradition which had guaranteed it its separateness just as the
techniques of mass reproduction deprived the work of art of the ‘aura’ of its
uniqueness on which alone its critical function could be predicated. Marcuse
argues the point with force and clarity:

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the
protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and
Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead,
they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the
mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more
educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other
than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the
estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. The intent and
function of these works have thus fundamentally changed. If they once
stood in contradiction to the status quo, this contradiction is now flattened
out. (Marcuse, 1970, p. 64)

It is this aspect of the Frankfurt critique which has been taken up most frequently
by cultural theorists on the left. In particular, mention should be made of Walter