Culture Industry: A Contemporary Revision of the Term of Theodor Adorno

Culture Industry and Consumer Goods

Theodor Adorno explains in A Critic to the Culture industry, section of the book Aesthetic Theory published in 1970, that as far as art corresponds to a social manifested necessity, it transforms itself mostly in a business governed by the profit, which persists as long as it is profitable. By doing so, art makes itself aside, confirming being nothing but something already dead (Adorno, 1970, p. 34).

Adorno exposes the means used by the culture industry in order to transform art pieces into commodities when he makes clear that the ‘naïve’ people of the culture industry, avid of commodities, locate themselves closer to art, perceiving how art is inadequate to accompany the process of social life. Adorno argues that the creation of this proximity to art only intensifies the culture industry, as well as, at the same time, here the idea of the immediatism of art to the society is planned to deceive (Adorno, 1970, p. 376). On the other hand, the culture industry defends that art suffered a process in which it ceased being what it is and lost its specificity, becoming consumer goods in the shape of catharsis and art pieces themselves (Adorno, 1970, p. 34).

In the following paragraphs we will then explain how for Adorno the art and its catharsis became consumer goods.