Culture industry products are commodities through and through, not merely commodified art

Evidence

The cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as Brecht and Suhrkamp expressed it thirty years ago, by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation. … New on the part of the culture industry is the direct and undisguised primacy of a precisely and thoroughly calculated efficacy in its most typical products. … Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through. This quantitative shift is so great that it calls forth entirely new phenomena. … Brought to bear is a general uncritical consensus, advertisements produced for the world, so that each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 135

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The claim that mass culture previously sought profit only ‘over and above its autonomous essence’ parallels the additive/direct distinction useful for applying the frame in ‘Grafting & Growth’ to how independent work gets absorbed.
• DEFINE: The key quantitative/qualitative threshold: when profit motive shifts from indirect to direct and undisguised, culture becomes commodity through and through.
• XREF: connects to: Modern art openly admits it is a commodity rather than hiding its market status — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 118; Technology’s unification of all arts will expose the identity behind industrial culture; Culture industry commodities are useless yet disguise their uselessness as utility — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 836