Mass art turns history into costume hiding monopoly’s frozen present

Evidence

Nobody is deceived by intrigue any more now that its law has established itself directly in all its omnipotence. Mass art registers this fact inasmuch as it repudiates conflict as outmoded or if it borrows it from the store of traditional culture removes it from the realm of genuine spontaneity by predetermining its character. The bourgeois types generally associated with intrigue and conflict seem to appear in the prison clothing which they are supposed to have acquired in the liberal past. The word ‘banker’ has become a term of abuse even in the United States, like ‘lawyer’ and ‘professional politician’, and the dissatisfied ambitious woman fares no better when she is depicted as a vamp. Reporters and impresarios are still tolerated as comic relics. History is extruded from tales which have become cultural commodities, even and especially there where historical themes are exploited. History as such becomes a costume identified with the individual concealing the frozen modernity of monopoly and state capitalism. Hence the emergence of that false reconciliation, the absorption of every negative counter-instance by an omnipotent reality, the elimination of dissonance in the bad totality. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 125

Categorization

• SEED: The idea that ‘history as such becomes a costume’ — period-set blockbusters that are secretly about the frozen present — could seed an essay on heritage fatigue and why nostalgia is always a disguised argument about the now.