the arts themselves, such calls are attractive to politicians suspected of
congenital philistinism. The philistinism implicit in the notion that more cash
produces more and better goes unnoticed.
(26 September 1997)
In many respects, Pick and Walden are developing ideas advanced decades earlier
by Theodor Adorno. Central to Adorno’s critique is the application of capitalist
industrialism, namely the profit motive, to creative activity: ‘the total effect of the
culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment. … It impedes the development of
autonomous independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for them-
selves’ (Adorno 1991: 92). Mass culture is identical and the lines of its artificial
framework begin to show through: ‘The customer is not king, as the culture
industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object’ (Adorno 1991: 85).
Adorno’s criticism of the manufacture of mass culture – as kitsch versus the
genuine art of the avant-garde – is part of a political Left critique (see, for example,
the early writings of art critic Clement Greenberg); at the other end of the political
spectrum, popular culture is a bugbear of conservative journals of criticism like
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