An off-topic comment on my previous post–which was my personal memorial to the late and woefully-underrated George Kooymans (Rust in vrede, Meneer Kooymans)–inspired me to write this piece about what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called the culture industry. The comment I’m alluding to was about ‘musicians’ (all of them pushed by the recording industry and its gatekeepers), but I’m also going to talk about all aspects of the culture industry and cultural sector, with my personal focus being on the film and publishing industries as well as the music industry.
Nowadays–with very few exceptions–a lot, if not most, of what we hear on the radio, see on TV and in movie theatres, and quite possibly on mainstream-bookstore shelves–is (and I’m going to be impolite here) crap–crap that managed to get approved by the gatekeepers and financed by studios and publishing houses (especially the Big Five), simply because the head honchos in those establishments know it will make money, and they don’t want to deviate from that and chance distributing work that will cost them money without making any of it back–or at least making less money than they spent.
Now, I’m not saying that everything produced from the 1950s to the 1990s ( and earlier) was good–there was a lot of crap produced it those days, too; for instance, ‘boy’ bands, namely those in the late 1980s and late 1990s–Vanilla Ice and the Spice Girls weren’t all that great, either; however, before the turn of the millennium, artists have had to work at their craft, regardless of the technology available to them during the respective periods of history they lived in (in the periods before Autotune existed, anyway), and, if they had no artistic talent or nobody supported their work, they had to do something else. I will acknowledge that there were hacks and plagiarists in all periods of history, but, for real artists, money wasn’t the sole driver (and still isn’t). And that’s not even getting into generative artificial intelligence (another post for another time…and I’ve expressed my thoughts on this subject elsewhere–and I can’t believe I may have more thoughts on this subject).
But we do live in under the economic system that is capitalism–and, under that economic system, visual art, music, books, film and television shows, and other works of art are, like almost everything else under said system, merely products to be bought and sold on what is (laughably) called the free market.
In this day and age, the words of Adorno and Horkheimer, unfortunately, turned out to be eerily prophetic. What’s on the radio outside of classic-rock stations all sounds the same–pop ‘acts’ are indistinguishable from each other, to the point of being interchangeable (again, with few exceptions); only on the odd occasion is the world–accidentally–exposed to an actual musician or band who’s released something good into the world (case in point: Ghost Hounds and their song, ‘Last Train to Nowhere’). The last time I went to the cinema to watch a movie was when I went to see the screen adaptation of Wicked–and I can’t remember when that was–and I haven’t been back to the movie theatre since, simply because most of the movies being advertised nowadays aren’t worth the money or the energy I’d spend going out to see them, regardless of any Scene points I’d get for doing so. As for books…well, I’ll admit I’m often tempted to purchase a lot of the books I see on the shelves, regardless of their genre, but a huge part of me wonders if any of those books are worth their asking price…in which case, I’m grateful public libraries aren’t, as of yet, defunct.
But, going back to my point–if we want to watch, listen to, or read anything worth anything, for the most part, we have to work for it now (if we don’t stumble upon it), since a lot of what the mainstream free market is selling us now is somewhere between dreck and shlock. I don’t mean to sound like a baby boomer in making this pronouncement–I’m actually a Generation Xer (I may even be what’s known as an Xennial)–but I want whatever I pay to listen to, watch, and read to be worth the asking price. I understand that taste is subjective, but corporate entities have interfered for far too long in the advertising, marketing, and distribution of the products of the cultural sector.
And that’s the problem with works of art (particularly music, film/television, and, to a lesser extent, books) we’re being sold in this day and age, especially in the mainstream: corporate interests. A lot of the music, movies, television shows, and books being presented to us nowadays are marketing decisions made by faceless corporations whose chief, if not sole, interest is making money. Within the last decade or so, I’ve heard voices crying for people to support independent music, film, and book publishers and stores, but, the economy being what it is, that’s always been difficult, and is getting increasingly so, especially for those folks who have limited income (for the most part).
Sorry for the stream-of-consciousness Boomer-esque rant, but I just believe that we, as a society need to expect more and better when it comes to works of any kind of art–and make it accessible to everyone.
Chloe Desilets 