Mass culture replaces genuine art experience with identification and evaluation

Evidence

All genuine experience of art is devalued into a matter of evaluation. The consumer is encouraged to recognize what is offered to him: the cultural object in question is represented as the finished product it has become which now asks to be identified. This universal informational character sets the seal upon the radical alienation between the consumer and the inescapable proximity of the product. He finds himself dependent upon information when his own experience proves inadequate and the apparatus trains him to appear well-informed on pain of losing prestige among other people and to renounce the more arduous process of real experience. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 124

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal of running Adorno’s pseudo-individuation analysis on post-death culture — e.g. how streaming recommendations and ‘best of’ listicles train consumers to evaluate rather than experience. — connects to: Mass-produced culture reduces individuality to a stamped counterfeit detail — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 117; Prestige seeking replaces genuine enjoyment in cultural consumption; Technology’s unification of all arts will expose the identity behind industrial culture
• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which the informational apparatus devalues experience into evaluation — a core tool for the reader’s project.