The culture industry reduces art’s promise of happiness to a medicinal bath of fun

Evidence

The culture industry was making even escape from a world determined by the principle of realistic self-denial into a part of that world. It was succeeding in passing off a dreamless art as the fulfilment of dreams, and smiling or jovial renunciation as a compensation for renunciation. From the point of view of the opening essays and the two excursuses, the culture industry meant the reduction of the promise of happiness offered by art, which had been neutralized into an object of contemplation, to the status of a medicinal bath' of fun’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 360

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the precise Dialectic of Enlightenment definition of the culture industry as the reduction of art’s happiness-promise to ‘fun’.