Technology’s unification of all arts will expose the identity behind industrial culture

Evidence

The efforts to recapture the Great Refusal in the language of literature suffer the fate of being absorbed by what they refute. As modern classics, the avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will. This absorption is justified by technical progress; the refusal is refuted by the alleviation of misery in the advanced industrial society. The liquidation of high culture is a byproduct of the conquest of nature, and of the progressing conquest of scarcity. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 319 (#expands, via linked claim)

To point to the potency of such a force in shaping culture as a total way of life is not necessarily to lapse, however, into a simple­ minded technological determinism of the ‘television causes post­ modernism’ variety. For television is itself a product of late capitalism and, as such, has to be seen in the context of the promotion of a culture of consumerism. This directs our attention to the production of needs and wants, the mobilization of desire and fantasy, of the politics of distraction as part and parcel of the push to sustain sufficient buoyancy of demand in consumer markets to keep capitalist production profitable. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 410 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Indeed, we may speak of spatialization here as the process whereby the traditional fine arts are mediatized: that is, they now come to consciousness of themselves as various media within a mediatic system in which their own internal production also constitutes a symbolic message and the taking of a position on the status of the medium in question. Gober’s installation — which includes what might once have been called painting, sculpture, writing, and even architecture — thus draws its effects from a place not above the media but within their system of relationships: something it seems better to characterize as a kind of reflexivity rather than the more conventional notion of “mixed media,” which normally implies the emergence of a kind of superproduct or transcendental object — the Gesamtkunstwerk — from this synthesis or combination. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 381 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 319; The awe of technology substitutes for transcendence in mass culture. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 110; Modernity’s cult of novelty masks a sameness produced by industrial reproducibility. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 257 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society #expands (0.88) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 319
• Technology’s cultural effects are mediated by late capitalism not deterministically #complicates (0.85) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 410
• Postmodern art operates within media systems rather than unifying them into transcendent wholes #complicates (0.84) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 381
• The awe of technology substitutes for transcendence in mass culture. #corroborates (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 110
• Modernity’s cult of novelty masks a sameness produced by industrial reproducibility. #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 257
• Mass culture replaces genuine art experience with identification and evaluation #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 124
• The culture industry’s technique is distribution, external to the artistic object #qualifies (0.78)
• Industrialism’s communication technologies shaped humanity’s global self-awareness #exemplifies (0.78) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 190
• The culture industry rules by manufacturing the needs it satisfies #corroborates (0.77) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107
• Culture industry products are commodities through and through, not merely commodified art #expands (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 135
• Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity #exemplifies (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 184