Category Archives: Art and Culture

The Cultural Sector, Capitalism, and Generative AI

Some time while I was writing my previous post about capitalism and the cultural sector, I started thinking about Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and their commentary about what they called the ‘culture industry,’ and how the advent of generative artificial intelligence fits into the discussion.

Horkheimer and Adorno coined the term ‘culture industry’ to describe the standardization of works of art, literature, music, etc., and likened it to a factory mass-producing products, designed to pacify and control populations under capitalism, leading to standardization, manipulation, the manufacture of false needs, and the commodification of culture, the consequences of which–for individuals and society–include ‘the suppression of individuality, the devaluation of genuine art, and the perpetuation of social inequalities.’ Adorno and Horkheimer contend that ‘industrially-produced culture robs people of their imagination and does their thinking for them,’ leaving people to merely consume art and culture–and passively.

And that was before the advent of artificial intelligence–of any kind.

The aims of the culture industry are–as in every industry–economic in nature. And with generative AI–especially when it comes to art and other creative pursuits–it’s all about the money. AI doesn’t care about quality, and, unlike humans, anything run by AI can’t put its own individual ‘spin’ on ideas and influences; because AI runs machines, all it can do is what people program it to do. At its best, generative AI perpetuates industrially-produced culture.

For me, in terms of use of AI, the problem is the same one I have with the culture-industrial complex in general and, well, just in general: corporate interests–in this scenario, corporate interests ushering in generative and other kinds of AI without doing a cost-benefit analysis–and because corporations want to get products and services to the public in the shortest amount of time possible. And that’s the problem with the culture industry–any work of art is just another product to be bought and sold.

That’s not to say artists don’t like being paid for the work they do, but money isn’t the end-all be-all for us; the truth is, art–real art–is one way humans engage with the world. And the latter point is one point (out of many) I believe Horkheimer and Adorno were trying to make when they criticized the culture industry.

However, at this juncture, it seems the artificial-intelligence horse has bolted–thanks especially to corporate interests–and now artists and others who see the dangers of unregulated AI are scrambling to shut the stable door. Of course, it doesn’t help that governments–especially those in developed, industrialized nations–have corporate sponsors, so of course regulation, if it exists, is lacklustre at best, and prioritizes corporate interests over human rights. And yes, people freely consuming AI ‘art’ contributes to the problem, but that is more a problem of the system–a system which, among other things, makes real art inaccessible to the masses…or at least less accessible to the masses than to the upper echelons of society. Yes, individual choices can make a difference, but let’s not hyperfocus on that–especially to the point that it relieves the most powerful segments of society (read: governments and corporations) of even the tiniest semblance of responsibility.

But AI ‘art’ just drives home what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno said about, and perpetuates, the culture industry, while threatening the livelihoods of real artists and further leading to the devaluation of genuine art and the pacification of the masses and enriching corporations and other opportunists. In short, AI ‘art’ is just art produced (not even) in a factory, created with no talent, skill, or work (since a lot of AI ‘art’ is actually plagiarized), a product with no depth or meaning.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry

Modernisation or Destruction: The Cultural Industry in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

My previously-expressed thoughts on artificial intelligence:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/46823/episodes/17534735-ai-slop-money-for-nothing

Capitalism and the Culture-Industrial Complex

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.

Evolution

I attended a free exhibition at a local art gallery this past Saturday, which included a discussion following the tour of the exhibition. During this discussion, some of my fellow attendees claimed current media, like television and video games, isolate us from our fellow humans and numb us to the world, and parents and other authority figures aren’t doing as much as parents of yesteryear did to engage with their kids, and get their kids to engage with the world, by, for instance, sending them outside to play.

Granted, there is such a thing as too much time in front of a screen–computer, television, what have you. But I don’t see evidence that anyone who watches more than twenty hours of television a week or plays video games is deadened to the world; in fact, the gamers and TV geeks in my life are relatively normal. People, kids included, are not automatons; they are capable of consuming the media they do and still interacting normally with the world.

The discussion at the gallery also delved into whether or not any of the pieces we saw were art, and what qualifies as ‘art;’ one man stated artists should learn the rules of art before doing it. I took a continuing-studies course at Emily Carr University, which was an introductory look at form and composition in art; from that perspective, I agree it does help to have a rudimentary grasp of the basics of form and composition when starting work on a composition, as opposed to taking a haphazard approach. I’m now wondering if the artists whose work was displayed at the gallery this Saturday took any art courses or not, where they learned their craft, and what was going through their minds as they worked on their pieces.

The fact is, art and culture, like everything else, evolve. The criteria for what is considered art has expanded, and tastes have expanded with them. To state the painfully obvious–and what has been stated before–art, like taste, is subjective. It’s just a question of what stands the test of time, and what ends up in the ashcan of history.

And, no matter what happens, humans are a social species–evolution has seen to that; ergo, we will always seek company and community with our fellow humans.