In the time of postmodern condition where monopolized capitalism and technological reproducibility take off tirelessly, the significance of virtuosity in the work of art is being questioned and challenged. To Frankfurt school’s scholar, Theodor W. Adorno, the term, culture industry, implies a polemical intervention into the mass society that heralds the repetitive and spectacular attributes of art and culture. Another scholar, Walter Benjamin, is deeply convinced that the loss of aura, caused by the context of a disenchanted modernity, could on the other hand, be seen as a liberation from the mythical images of tradition and a progression in the new era of rational explanation of culture. However, one may seek not to predicate on a verdict only by taking one side to examine a critical spectatorship, but to explore how both discussions are pertinent to making a continual dialogue of reading culture industry critically. Whilst “l’art pour l'art” (art for art’s sake) has a great vogue in the end of the last century, affirming that artistic pursuits are the only justification that artwork should not hold any moral or social purpose, art can and should assume a critical role to marshal the internalization among masses, who may then begin to question the surroundings, against total reception in distraction. 

 

 In avoidance of being co-opted by Debord’s Society of Spectacle, where one may be easily mulched, masticated and made over into representation of images in the process of standardization, there is a need to reconfigure a more radical critique of the cultural apparatus that has prepared for the chief character to combating the automatically tragic farce. Combining both Adorno’s and Benjamin’s ideas, this paper creates an open dialogue to always seeing culture in question marks and propounds that the roles of audience and art are bilateral: culture as leisure and entertainment and at the same time a critical scrutiny based on politics – Art for Man’s Sake. 

 

  The Frankfurt school discerns the disquiet about the standardization of art under capitalism, where culture industry is churning out a debased mass of unsophisticated and sentimental product, setting the term: divest[ing] the listener of his spontaneity and promot[ing] conditioned reflexes (Adorno, 1942). The threat of being encouraged to passively ingest facts from a variety of technological sources without critical reflection is reproachful.

 

  Correspondingly, the role of audience is never unilateral. A reproducible work of art also allows for the secularization of art, which closes the contemplative distance from its audience and facilitates a more participatory culture, known as exhibition value. Reconciling both ideas, there is a need for a radical critique of the cultural apparatus. To adopt a new avant-garde approach, we, being a responsible audience, can appreciate the entertainment value of art; develop a sense of critical scrutiny based on politics; reflect and are replete with reality in its representation at the same time. Culture industry, therefore, appears as an anthropological concept of understanding what and why, that has most often been left inarticulated by its complexity. How we “understand and use” culture and how culture “influence” us in turns become a significant vector that relentlessly seeks to interrogate the various interpretations of culture; identify variations in its use, examine the pitfalls of easy entertainment and pleasures of maintaining its current ambiguity. 

 

  Under late capitalism and commodity fetishism, what happens at school or in the office can only be escaped by approximating it in one’s leisure time. The culture industry has brought fully amusement up to date in cultural products, which is elevated to a principle of obtrusive naiveties that most of us are ineptly susceptible to its exchange and entertainment value, rather than the quality of the products. More specifically, Adorno (2002) crystallizes the promotion of thoughtlessness in popular music:

Distraction is not only a presupposition of popular music but also a product of popular music. The tunes themselves lull the listener to inattention. They tell him not to worry, for he will not miss anything.

 

  We cannot be wronged to enjoy the superficial effect of popular music, but we should be wary of its critical role to avoid giving autonomous response, not with question: what is this artwork? But with transcendental questions: What is the concept of the value of the artwork? How should it be valued aesthetically and ethically? What is silenced in the product? To what extent can we feel meaningful connections to the real-world context? Rhythmically obedient music, such as K-pop or J-pop, is generally scathed of failing to answer the above questions, since its listeners are susceptible to ‘masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism’ (2002). On the surface, culture industry constructs a production-line mentality in producing cultural products that all films and TV shows we watch are seemingly different, without being aware of its recycled formulas as shared in other types of consumer goods. The promulgation of the self-indulgent consumer-oriented products are manifest under the same scheme which allows them to be “readable” and effortlessly digested. This is how culture industry imposes conformity – with things that only seem to be different but are in fact all slight variations of the same thing. Anthropologically, people suffer the same fate of art under the culture industry – they are reduced to the exchange value with no intrinsic or unique traits as the Enlightenment had dreamt.      

 

  To read this kind of mass production more critically, we should look into the contradiction within the dynamic between entertainment and ethics. The most influential Korean boyband in this century, ‘Bangtan Sonyeondan’ (BTS), released the most controversial music video in 2017, Spring Day. Alongside all those good-looking singers in the music video, one can identify different signifiers used to decipher a signified calamity – Sinking of MV Sewol in 2014. First, it borrows the concept from The One Who Walks Away from Omelas[1] to allude the viewers to the corruption of Korean government. The hazy view and angle, the empty rail carriage with baggage, the maze-like vertigo stairs, the endless spinning of washing machine in laundry, the clock frozen at 9:35am (the time when the first guard boats arrived to rescue the rapped victims) and the practice of shoe tossing, provide all hints to viewers. Beyond the notion of standardization, we should not be reduced to consider it as an expression of rigidity, but a source of significance that speaks up the camouflaged political criticism. In confronting the corrupt-but-competent South Korean government, popular music video serves as a powerful means to buck the convention. Spring Day has successfully delivered the ethical implications against victimization and criticized the Korean for covering up the tragedy and shifting the blame when they are the one to be guilty of. Given the democratic nature in its accessibility of mass art, we should celebrate what may be expressed through the cultural products, and be mindful of the potential impacts upon viewers. Alas, whether popular culture can serve as a vehicle for socio-political commentaries depends on the larger context. 

 

  So far in the discussion of Adorno’s view towards culture industry, his predilection for passive audience does not take into account the change of organization of means in the production process. In a technological world of Web 2.0, works of art themselves are recomposed from fragments. As Benjamin has been aware of, the destruction of the criterion of the aura of artwork gives rise to a political aesthetics of revolutionary intervention in society for reading culture industry more critically. Consequently, we as the audience, are no longer the mere receivers in the passive participation of cultural consumption. Several digital and social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and forums do not only corroborate a critical form of consumer-citizenship but reconnect people through the process of ‘prosumption[2]’, usually in the form of parody. Derivative arts for example, present opportunities for subversion. We do not just read and analyse an artwork, but internalize it to question the rules or defects of the society. In the run-up to 2017 Chief Executive Election, a famous Hong Kong based forum, HK Galden, where its netizens create many derivative works, published a song parody adapting to the original song, Old Habits Die Hard from Twins, to scorn for the ready-to-be Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, whose decision-making was criticized as heads in the clouds. The netizens repurposed the song to develop their original and critical view towards politics and widely captures discursive attention and discussion. The logic is: if we absorb the work of art, but are trapped in mythologies or alienated subjectivity, then the revolutionary power of art will be truncated. Hence, the more the culture industry allows for diverse narratives and values, the more creative it is. This in turn allows for critical spectatorship. 

 

  In other words, critical spectatorship is a creation within a creation. The ultimate aim is to see the artwork as in itself it really is or may be not, that we should not only criticize merely the individual work of art, but seek the polyvalent perspective in the age of mechanical reproduction, as discussed by Benjamin. The way we look and see the visual work of art has is different now and this requires an understanding of how a particular kind or form of art is viewed and interpreted through different lenses. Oscar Wilde may provide an answer to the importance of being critical of art with a polyvalent mind: 

To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes. The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or carved the gem.

 

  The true beauty of the work of art is its embeddedness in society as a whole, which challenges the audience to perceive reality in its dire representation, tensions and discordance – ‘art is negative knowledge of the actual world’ (Adorno, 1980). If mass art allows for the same understanding, and if this understanding is a false projection of one’s own desires onto others, then art itself will provide the mass audience a mimesis of false consciousness within a homogenous status quo. One can also recognize the paradox in the culture industry, that the loss of aura at the same time means that art no longer bears any authority and can possibly invite a continued critical judgment. To dismiss sameness, such judgement needs to provide grounds for a deeper transformation of consciousness and grab the dynamics of the social totality to which all artwork belongs. I engage such paradox with Jacques Derrida’s decentralization of the text (cultural products) and deconstruction of the difference between the margins and the centre. The more central and dominant the culture industry has become, the more mercilessly it has forced the marginalized products into a syndicate. Derrida admits that a structure without a centre is unconceivable, but he contends that the center delimits and diminishes the possible play within the structure. Play, then, is whatever goes against the coherence of the structure. The same applies to how we should read culture industry in a diverse lens: to decentralize the culture industry, we reject the idea of receiving the so-called normative entailments enframed by the society. We also embrace the play – the social taboos and silenced topics within the marginal dialogue. As Ross (2014) amplifies:

… [the] messages of dissent can emanate from the heart of the culture industry, particularly in giving voice to oppressed or marginalized groups. Any narrative of cultural regression must confront evidence of social advance: the position of Jews, women, gay men, and people of color is a great deal more secure in today’s neo-liberal democracies than it was in the old bourgeois Europe.

 

  This destructive approach redefines the recondite nature of cultures, and thus gives rise to the polycentric perspective - defying the idea of a single center to present a field of uneven and constantly shifting “hot-spots” that gain prominence at different points of time and space. 

 

  Wong Kar-wai’s dynamic postmodern spectacle holds the power to deconstruct the centre and challenge audiences. In 1997, Wong’s Happy Together sheds light on the homosexual relationship and explores the political effect Hong Kong during the time of its handover, mapped onto the painful co-dependent relationship between the two characters. Homosexuality is a taboo in the Confucian-influenced society. When the audience witnesses the moment Chang turns down the advances of female coworkers and prefers a lover with low speaking voices as his ideal type, the internal struggles of this marginalized group in reality unmasked. The subject, homosexuality becomes a centre that forms its own sphere of influence, as evident in the recent genres (i.e. Queer Cinema) in world cinema including Call Me By Your Name, Love Simon, 1985, The Happy Prince. 

 

  In modern times, the destruction of aura implies the democratization of art. The reproduction of artworks allows for transformations in how we perceive reality and offer us new perspectives towards the world simultaneously. Because of this, the world is now so much uncritically ingested. Overwhelmed by a barrage of free choices, we should always see arts critically as an ongoing conversation so that we will never be satisfied with static. We must be sensitive and critical in approaching different forms of art. Only when we change will arts do the same – art is for man’s sake.

 

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Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. On Popular Music. Institute of Social Research, 1942.

Adorno, Theodor W. Essay On Music. University of California Press. 2002.

Adorno, Theodor W. “Reconciliation under duress”. In Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Ernst Bloch et al. London, 1980: Verso. P.160.

Adorno Theodor W., and Horkheimer Max. The Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Marist Literary Criticism, 1944,

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm. Accessed 15 October 2018.

Ross, Alex. “Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the critique of pop culture.” The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/naysayers. Accessed 13 October 2018

 

 

 

 

[1] In this short philosophical allegory, Omelas is on the surface a utopia where days and nights are abundantly buzzing with joy. However, a child is locked in a dusky room since his sacrifice opens the door to peace and happiness of the majority. Knowing this truth, a few citizens leave Omelas. The music video compares this piece with the devastating tragedy and unmasks the moral accountability of a society where the happiness of the majority rests on the misery of the powerless minority.

[2] A dot-com era terming combining ‘production and consumption’ coined in 1980 by American futurist Alvin Toffler

[3] One month before the election, the netizens collectively repurposed the original song to create a politically satirical parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2znAbTlg4w