Mass cultural products come to resemble measurable sporting competitions

Evidence

While the consumers are tirelessly encouraged to compete, whether by virtue of the way in which goods are offered to them or through the techniques of advertising, the products themselves right down to the details of technical procedure begin to exhibit sport-like characteristics. They require extreme accomplishments that can be exactly measured. The task of the screen actor breaks down into a set of precisely defined obligatory exercises each of which is compared with the corresponding one in the work of all the other competitors in the same group. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 128

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the competition/virtuosity mechanism through which mass culture quantifies art — a testable claim about the gamification of cultural production.
• XREF: connects to: Football’s Premiership spectacle embodies anti-utopian market realism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1550; Sports sponsorship marketing cannot tolerate the unpredictability that makes sport compelling — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1615