Only the art of avant garde can do this.Īnother criticism mass culture vs folk culture. Popular Culture is an instrument for maintaining class privilege, its heavy use of kitsch panders to people's infantile wishes for how the world ought to be, and it does not present to its audience a vision of the world thhat is different, and morally better, than the one in which we live. True art -avant garde- enables one to imagine a world different from that in which we live. According to Adorno, an expressionist work such as Picassso's 'Guernica' evokes a public outcry that testifies to its power 'to bring to light what is wrong with present social conditions.' Kitsch, on the otherhand is 'sugary trash' which presents 'the beautiful minus its ugly counterpart.' By concealing the ugly, Adorno argues that Kitsch panders to our longing to 'feel on safe ground all of the time' gratifying 'infantile need for protection'.Īnother problem that they have with popular culture isfound in Avant-garde art which is the cultural activity where the resources necessary to revolutionize the consciousness of the masses can be expected to rise. Unlike genuine art, which is difficult to experience, the reception of Kitsch is effortless.Īdorno - a genuine work of art requires effort to understand, 'substantively' because it explores the dialectic of the beautiful and the ugly and formally because it portrays this dialectic through abstract and complex media, all of which demand sustained and disciplined reflection in order to grasp the inspiration behind them. The Frankfurt school refined the notion of Kitsch into a technical term with both aesthetic and political import. He then concludes that the energy expended on the weekends to master the frenzied histrionics of 'jitterbugging' or simply to like popular music depletes the reserves of energy that might otherwise further one's social transformation 'into a man'. Wherever revolutionary tendencies show a timid head, they are mitigated and cut short by a false fulfilment of wish dreams, like wealth,adventure, passionate love, power, and sensationalism in general.'Īdorno converges on the 'releasing element' of popular music that reconciles people to their unhappiness: 'It is Katharsis for the masses but Katharsis which keeps them all the more firmly in line'. Lowenthal: 'There is considerable agreement that all media are estranged from values and offer nothing but entertainment and distraction- that, ultimately, they expedite flight from an unbearable reality. These industries are overseen by the powerful heads of economic, political, and military establishments who hire specialists to reiterate through various media the ideology of capitalism. The Culture industries churn out art and entertainment that lull the oppressed into believing that they are actually happy with their lot in life. In the twentieth century, the capitalist ideology circulated through what the frankfurt theorists came to refer to as 'the culture industries'.
These ideas and values are so deeply embedded in their consciousness that they are taken for granted as reflecting what is most true about reality. Ideology refers to the presence in a society of a set of ideas and values that organise people's perceptions and vision of life. They had been deluded with that Marx called a 'false-class consciousness'. What the Frankfurt school concluded was that the masses had so deeply imbibed the ideology of the ruling class that they were operating out of it and sustaining it without protest. Marx had predicted that capitalism was an unstable system, on the verge of crisis and a revolution from below. Their founding problem was the puzzling fact that the working class failed to see the wretched conditions in which it labored and consequently failed to overthrow its oppressors. Expelled from Germany by the Nazis, all of them migrated to the US in the early 1930s. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Eric Fromm.
The earliest concerted effort to theorize popular culture is to be found in the Frankfurt institute for social research, which was founded in Germany in 1923 by neo-Marxist sociologists who pioneered the field of 'critical theory'.
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