I think the phrase “culture industry” is already the point where it’s gone off the rails.
One of several parts of the Blue Man Group’s Complex Rock Tour was poking fun at the contradiction in terms that is “the music industry.” That something which is meant to be human and intangible is churned out on an assembly line like kitchen appliances.
music is measurable, can be produced by inhuman objects, and has value. Everything that meets these requirements will be produced at scale in capitalism, this is not a design flaw, it is a design feature.
Draining? It’s already in late stage of decomposition
Wait, Bob Chipman quoted Sony Pictures in a critique of the Mark Webb Amazing Spider-Man series. They used a phase something like content as product. Chipman noted the Webb movies were greenlit not because we needed another Spider-Man movie. In fact, they rejected Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 on the assumption that Spidey was getting stale. (Even though 3 was well received, just not as much as the moguls wanted).
But Disney was wanting Spider-Man in the MCU, and Sony wanted to preserve its rights in order to get a slice of that Disney pie. Marvel owns Spider-Man and was free to sell to Disney if Sony wasn’t going to make a movie. So they made movies to cockblock Disney. They didn’t have a story or a good idea, they just needed to make a movie, even a bad one, to evergreen their Spider-Man rights.
And this led to some ideas from Marketing / Accountancy: What if we extend this same notion of just making movies without inspiration or concepts the same way, since we know enough about what consumers will buy tickets for. (The movie market is mostly teens who don’t know any better, hence the 1980s trend of making sure boobs happened in at least one scene.)
Content as product, manufactured the way one manufactures turkey bacon, or Twinkies.
Curiously, we actually saw a similar trend in the music industry in the late 80s, where the labels decided they figured out the perfect formula to knock out hit after hit. (Patrick Bateman would talk about how totally amazing this music was as he was prepping to butcher his next victim.)
We’re also seeing it in strategic maneuvers like Warner shelving Batgirl as a tax write off, a maneuver that demonstrates even Warner doesn’t regard cinema as art rather than content to be consumed.
We’ve already seen this kind of devastation happen to the game industry, where AAA games depend on a publisher-proprietary platform, have an always-online mandate (even with single-player) and is loaded with microtransactions, and intentionally made less fun by making the grind tedious so that bypasses of parts of the game can be sold as time savers.
When art is no longer about expression but consumption, the producers have lost the plot. Much like the dusk of Classical Hollywood and the art-film age of the 1970s this is probably going to create an era of low-budget films that are actually good, while the big studios try to sue the snot out of the small production companies for trumped-up rights violations (think the Pokémon vs. Palworld litigation that is ongoing, and apply the same notion to cinema projects).
In film school (25 years ago), there was a lot of discussion around whether or not commerce was antithetical to art. I think it’s pretty clear now that it is. As “culture industries” lean more on AI, I hope the silver lining will be a modern Renaissance of art as (meaningful but unprofitable) creative expression.
I just happened to see this
TL:DW Video essay about how skill learning has been crushed under the boots of capitalism, and the only path to self fulfilment is to steal minutes away from the megacorps and give them to your art. Not for content or for money, but for your soul.
Great video, super funny, unique editing. Highly recommend if you have the time.
How do we get boobs back in movies?
There are two noteworthy points in history featuring boobs in cinema.
The 1980s in the US is the era of the slasher flick, and the film student age, so Lucas, Speilberg, Coppola, etc.) when arty films started getting a (tiny bit more of) a budget. It’s also before the internet, so one is not able to just look for boobs on the internet.
As Sarah Marshall notes (discussing the history of porn) these R-rated movies are the only place where a fellow might see boobs other than his partner’s. The early internet (and its predecessor, usenet) provided a lot more boobs, and so boob content fell off from mainstream cinema in the late 90s and early aughts. DVD is also a factor, which not only didn’t require MPAA approval, but often advertised The Unrated Version and we got to see a lot more European movies which were a lot more relaxed about boobs.
Also, we get plenty of boobs in TV series on Netflix and whatever HBO is called now.
But then there’s what happened to Spanish cinema after the death of General Franco
He died, and his extreme censorship was quickly lifted. Spanish Cinema went through The Stripping Years in which films featured at least one gratuitous sex scene with boobs and pubes (we weren’t all trimmed French or Brazilian yet) simply as a celebration of freedom of expression. So if the Republicans succeed in taking away everyone’s porn, there will not only be extra-risqué black market films, but the US mainstream cinema will likely go through a boobalicious phase because now we can show this again!
I’d like to trade them for those exhaustingly unfunny one-liners
The only question worth asking, during any time
The fact these business types call it a “culture industry” is all you need to know.
People used to make up songs just for the fun of it and that was the majority of songs people knew. Now most songs you know are made specifically to generate money. Hell, kids sing jingles.
The term “culture industry” was coined by Horkheimer and Adorno, who were actually Marxist critics, so the origin of the term is pejorative, but the business types did adopt it.
Til
I made up a song while putzing around the house this weekend. Sadly, I can’t imagine platforms willing to host a folk hero song about St Luigi and a sorely-needed revolution…
try Bandlab, I might be able to whip up a guitar something to go along. I’m @hadriscus
Feels like culture meth. Too easy to hear the greatest musicians, see the best movies, play the best games. Our ability to enjoy “real” things is diminished and the only way to consistently get our fix is via culture industries.
The good thing is that people always will create. There are bad effects of the current monopolies, but they are temporary.
Are they? Disney has been around like, what, about a century? Popular media makes money. How exactly do you think these culture monopolies are temporary?
Are you claiming that Disney has been a monopoly for a century? That’s an interesting claim.
What I see happening is that the major media companies are producing a lot of garbage. Until relatively recently, they were able to get away with this because there were few alternatives and there was a kind of shared cultural knowledge of, for example, pop music or popular movies. These days, there’s too much media to consume from too many sources and some of it is free or incredibly cheap. It doesn’t take much for large swaths of the general public in any given country to abandon the traditional movie companies or the famous music companies.
Was it this article or another one that I read yesterday that remarked how the majority of people don’t know Taylor Swift’s music. She’s incredibly popular, world famous, but there are so many more people who just don’t know her music. And that’s a big contrast with the Beatles or Michael Jackson. If the media companies aren’t panicking, they should be.
Movies used to be about telling stories but now they’re about making X% return on your investment
Everything just kinda… hit a wall in 2016.
Films, TV, general media kinda stagnated, and it hasn’t really gotten over the slump. I run a Jellyfin server full of content, and the entire family has free access to it. Nobody uses it these days, nobody even bothers paying for streaming. Most of their entertainment is just Facebook, podcasts and YouTube.
Unless your show is more entertaining than doom scrolling a content stream that constantly agrees and praises you, then I dunno, man.
Plenty of good shows.
Reddit.com/r/television.Just look at most recent recommendations thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/1himwu7/what_are_you_watching_and_what_do_you_recommend/?sort=confidence
I think it’s just the superheroes genre that got stale
Hm, what happened in 2016…
Edit: if it wasn’t clear, I was referring to the US presidential election
The heat death of traditional marketing teams using discussion rather than algorithms to prescribe entertainment to the masses.
The summer of 2016 was pretty wonderful. Specifically June-July 2016. Hundreds of millions of persons all across the world were cooperating. It was the one time where I looked forward to crowds and talking to countless strangers.
“culture industry”
Imo culture and industry are mutually exclusive.
Why? Movies aren’t both culture and industry?
Well, yes, and because of that they are getting worse over time. There are still good movies, but the percentage of crap grows.
Games too are kinda both and since capitalism realized the earning potential, a lot of them turned to mtx shit.
Once stuff gets made by suits, it’s shit.
I can see that. I’d say that culture is the societal structures (that essentially set norms and guide things) and in our economic system are basically set by industrial decisions. So it makes sense.
Every aspect of life is being ruined by corpo parasites.
Every process is made to exteact money while making your life miserable.
Been saying for years that new music sucks because it’s all forced to fit an algorithm. Then been told I’m just old and crusty. Which is true.
Listen to any pop, country or Christian music. (Forget rock and roll, it’s long dead.) You can’t tell the songs apart. Watch this video to see what I mean. Nashville cranks our garbage by the truckload.
I know there are a thousand independent artists doing their own thing, but I’ll never hear them unless I wade through a mountain of crap I don’t like. There’s plenty of good shit from the 60s-90s to keep me happy.
Music was every bit as manufactured to shift units in the '60-90s, too.
Also works as a valid truth if one stops after “culture…”
Capitalism is draining the life from our
Capitalism is draining
thelife
Culture-Industrial-Complex
The technocultural artfactory assembly lines never sleep
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Best comment here
