This group is now full!
I would like to invite anyone critical of and dissatisfied with contemporary art and culture to join this new group. We will read T.W. Adorno's book "The Culture Industry' and meet up once a month to discuss each chapter in-depth. The aim is to deepen our understanding of his critical analysis, which, although conceived nearly a century ago, seems more relevant today than ever before - and which may enable us to assess our own time more clearly and radically.
We will go through the text slowly. No previous knowledge of Adorno is required, but we expect everyone to be well prepared for each meeting / to have read each chapter thoroughly. Discussion should go far beyond "I like it / I do not like it."
I am an artist with an interest in a wide range of fields and questions (philosophy, science, culture etc.). I have no previous experience in running this kind of group.
Date and location of the first meeting will be announced as soon as enough people will have signed up (minimum three).
The Culture Industry: Selected Essays On Mass Culture
Routledge Paperback – 17 May 2001
by Theodor W. Adorno Culture industry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.[1] Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.[1] The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse.
