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Art in the Internet Age II: The Culture Industry
As we saw in Part 1, Walter Benjamin was probably too optimistic about the revolutionary potential of new technologies. For this, he was highly criticised, not least of all by his friend and colleague, Theodor Adorno, who wrote to Benjamin a letter outlining his objections. Adorno thought that it was ‘pure romanticism’ to think a reactionary could be transformed into a member of the avant-garde through something as simple as a silent film. And, in spite of its ‘startling seductiveness’, Adorno disagreed with Benjamin’s theory that distraction is freeing, ‘if only for the simple reason that in a communist society, work would be organized in such a way that human beings would no longer be so exhausted or so stupefied as to require such distraction’.
For Adorno, the ‘culture industry’ is not made for the masses, nor by them. It is imposed: ‘The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him’. In drafts to their essay, ‘The Culture Industry’, Adorno and Horkheimer spoke of ‘mass culture’, but exchanged this expression for ‘the culture industry’ in order to exclude from the outset a favourable interpretation ‘that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme’.