Modernism’s decline removes the chief obstacle to culture industry dominance.
Evidence
The culture industry, which always sought to administer comfort and illusion, has benefited from the exhaustion of the modernist impulse. Without the ready rebuke of aesthetic modernism to contend with, without even the song of the Sirens or its stinging absence to counter it, the culture industry can entwine its version of aesthetic form with social form. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 63
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The Sirens figure is the hinge connecting this chapter to the Odyssey reading in Dialectic of Enlightenment — Adorno’s own master image.
Related
- Modernist art’s critical distance was purchased at the price of market subsumption. (similarity 0.81)
- Avant-garde culture thrives where administration has not fully taken hold (similarity 0.81)
- Taking the culture industry seriously requires critical, not deferential, attention. (similarity 0.80)
- Even modernist art becomes infected by the schema of mass culture. (similarity 0.80)
- The culture industry offers evidence of destinations rather than genuine escape (similarity 0.80)
- Culture industry’s total effect is anti-enlightenment fettering consciousness (similarity 0.79)