2006-05-30 - 8:08 p.m.
Products are just the extension of an image that already exists. On the first day God created the ad, it was on the 7th day that Our Father got around to the product.
The merging of high and low art damages both. High Art becomes less serious, prone to parody, low art is put in chains, stripped of the rebellion inherent when social control was not yet complete.
The hope says Adorno is that the mass media cultural products, by trying to appeal to everybody will unintentionally present social alternatives that could break the ideological hegemony. Socialism as Cold War Alternative, Terrorism replaced it, the latest enemy in the cult of the new, without the other what reason would the capitalists have to open the champagne and get out the cigars after the big victory.
Art no longer promises happiness only temporary relief from increasing labor. Postmodernism is so very democratic too. Leisure time should consist of the minimal amount of effort "Grace Under Fire" sports in general, Mozart, all equal cultural products. Leisure time must not offer the possibility of a spark of reflection as that spark might carry over into the working week and destroy the whole illusion.
Fascism represents the culmination of Western Rationalism. What did the advertizing executives learn from that psychological story?
Enthusiasm represents a fear of disobedience, the unconscious eagerness to carry out the latest desires for some father.
The existence of all the great forms of art are paradoxical, the novel is the bourgeois art form par excellence, the film, a worthy substitute.
The more inexorably the principle of exchange value destroys use value for human beings, the more deeply does exchange value disguise itself as the object of enjoyment.
This auto religion makes all men brothers in the sacramental moment with the divinely inspired words "This is a Rolls Royce."
