Consumer culture degrades culture because capital takes over the powers that criticized it

Evidence

Because of its impotence before the power of capital, and equally because its promises come increasingly to appear as an insult to those excluded from what is held out, culture is taken over by the very powers it had criticized. Consumer culture is the degradation of culture. By forgetting culture’s complicity with what it criticizes, conservative cultural critics can see the entanglement of culture and commerce only as a disgraceful corruption caused by a materialist society. Hence, conservative cultural critics call for the return of culture to autonomous purity. Yet, Adorno states, ‘all culture shares the guilt of society. It ekes out its existence only by virtue of injustice already perpetrated in the sphere of production.’ — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 47

Categorization

• XREF: ‘All culture shares the guilt of society’ — the reader’s existing work on sacrifice, where institutions are founded on prior violence, is a direct parallel. — connects to: Capital’s dominance is the real message of every cultural product; Rejecting taste weakens cultural capital and elevates raw wealth as status. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 775
• SEED: Essay angle: the conservative nostalgia for autonomous art repeats the very complicity it condemns — test against a ‘golden age cinema’ discourse.