It strikes me that we are talking about two separate things when we complain about the commodification to mass art (art for mass consumption) and also about the idiocy of modern art. The average person looks at a signed urinal and decides this is stupid, which is why the vast majority of modern art is disdained by the vast majority of people. The reason there is any market at all for modern art is because there is a community of (mostly wealthy, mostly well-educated, often left-wing) types who want to signal their disdain of both “good taste” and “average art.” They intentionally like art which exists solely to defy convention and to “prove” that beauty is a myth and aesthetics are meaningless. I don’t blame capitalism for that, but rather the intentional project on the part of some to reject both traditional aesthetic criteria, and consumerism (to prove that they’re “cultured”).
This isn’t original to me, but a lot of the complaints about mass culture are the same as the complaints going back centuries that the rich had about how poor people have bad taste. When you got an age that produced more democratic art (ie art for the majority population, not just the elites), you ended up with a lot of the cheap, low-brow stuff people disdain as “mass culture.” Why? Because capitalism gives people what they want and this actually does represent what the average human being wants. Most elites can’t come out and say they are snobs who look down on the taste of the poor, because they have to pretend that they’re on the side of the working man/proletariat (including to themselves). But the truth is that the fault isn’t capitalism, but human nature. Not everyone is intelligent or cultured or sophisticated. Like it or hate it, this is what we are.
Finally, Irving Kristol pointed out that the communist countries never produced good communist art. All the good socialist/communist art was produced in capitalist countries. It turns out capitalism really does work better than anything short of oligarchy (Rome, medieval Europe, etc.) at producing art. If more art is produced to meet a growing market for art consumption, the average art will be average, some art will be bad, and some subset of it will be good.
Agreed. Blaming the decline in Art on capitalism is lazy. There are always forces looking to take advantage of whatever captures public attention. As you mentioned, this happens as well in communist countries. The difference is that, in capitalist societies, people still had the freedom to create, and no one knew in advance what was going to trend.
To me, the downfall is simply because we produce less exciting new art. In the 50s and 60s, the US and France were capitalist, but it saw the rise of “New Hollywood” and the French New Wave in Cinema. Capitalists profited from it but it was at least interesting, original art. I explore that more in my article but maybe there comes a time where all the “low hanging fruits” are gone it’s just really hard to make something new, profound and relevant within a certain medium.
I think there's something to that idea that the low-hanging fruit is gone. So much of music and "literature" produced today are just imitations of what was innovative in the 60s and 70s. But on the flip side, that means that the bar for greatness is higher, and if people keep trying and keep taking risks, eventually someone will produce something that clears that bar and is truly innovative. If the easy innovations are gone, the innovations that are yet to come will be that much more important.
Yes, that's also what I'm hoping for. It could also lead to a completely new form of Art that we're not imagining yet (AI/virtual interactive story telling… who knows).
By the way, the repetitiveness is even worse in Cinema. Last year, literally ALL the top 10 box office hits were sequels, prequels or remakes.
1: Adorno apparently wants art that shows truth about life, but is without reference to politics, economics or any of the other things people care about in life. That strikes me as a problem.
2: I wouldn’t blame capitalism for Marvel slop; the market is punishing them pretty hard for their inability to make movies people want to watch. One might debate why they are such garbage the past 10 years, but definitely capitalism is not to blame for their Marxist creators.
I can’t comment on Taylor Swift… my wife likes her stuff, but it all sounds the same to me, as my music does to her. I can only assume she has terrible taste.
We all share a sense there is a problem with modernity. Adorno deals with the problem by drawing distinctions between "high art" and "low art," but his arguments are not forceful. I recommend Baudrillard's powerful essays about commodification and representation (aka, "simulacra.")
Duchamp's urinal (titled "Fountain") was the essence of Dada, the revelation of nonsense in the heart of efforts to take ourselves seriously. It's a cheap place to hang out. I think a lot of people have missed the joke. I find something worthwhile in an artist's careful, exploratory pursuit of abstraction, but that is a far cry from a banana taped to a wall.
For all his faults, Theodor Adorno was correct! There is such a thing as good art and bad art! Adorno is wrong to blame capitalism at least 100% for the decline in the quality of art over the past couple centuries. The half of the story was a movement called Impressionism. It at first simply loosened artistic standards but retained some elements of discipline. The first two generations of the movement were unbelievable and gave us geniuses like Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin. But over time it devolved into not merely loosening artistic standards but doing away with them altogether. Thus we arrive at where we are today where a bag of feces, a giant carving of someone’s rear end, a banana taped to a canvas, some cinder blocks, a bench, or a pair of glasses dropped on the floor is considered art. Here’s the problem with that, if everything is art than nothing is art. If art becomes so subjective it can be literally anything that defeats the whole purpose of art in the first place. Art is supposed to be beautiful, stand out from the ordinary and be something to behold. A pencil dropped on the floor and broken in half, a Kleenex full of boogers or a toilet is NOT art! The Mona Lisa, the Scream or Van Gogh’s Starry Night. That is art! Also, Adorno could not have been more right that art is NOT supposed to be universal or appeal to everyone. Everyone is NOT supposed to understand it! That’s the whole point! It’s supposed to introduce you to new ideas and new ways of seeing the world and make you think long after you’ve left the gallery or the museum! You’re absolutely right Liza, we need to consume art critically and parse out the quality stuff from the junk. For instance if we’re talking about film, examples of good art would be Frankenstein, Dracula, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, The Seventh Seal, The Wizard of Oz, George C. Scott’s version of A Christmas Carol, The Maltese Falcon, the Original Star Wars Trilogy, The Great Dictator, The Invisible Man, Modern Times, The Battle of Algiers, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and the original Godzilla. Examples of Bad Art would be Howard the Duck, Gigli, the Garbage Pail Kids, Battlefield Earth, Planet 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda?, Baby Geniuses, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. In terms of literature, examples of good art would be The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Cask of Amontillado, The Raven, Go Down, Moses, The Sound and the Fury, Two Soldiers, Intruder in the Dust, The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears A Who, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, King Lear, The Flea, To Kill A Mockingbird, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and I Heard A Fly Buzz. Examples of bad art would be Bad Feminist, Orientialism, Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching, The Hate U Give, and American Dirt. In Music, examples of good art would be: Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Motzart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Al Jolson, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Louie Armstrong, Count Basie, Jelly Roll Morton, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Whitney Houston, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Prince, Phil Collins, Selena, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patsy Cline, Dean Martin, Frank Zappa, and Roy Orbison. Examples of bad art would be Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Selena Gomez, Rihanna, Pitbull, Will I Am, Fergie, Jacob Satorious, Kendrick Lamar, Miley Cyrus, and Kesha. Phenomenal article worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, Liza!
OTOH, one should be very, very wary of looking at the writers of today and assuming that pop-culture disqualifies some from this category. Plays in the Elizabethan era were pop-culture and Ben Jonson was decried as foolish and arrogant for putting out his plays in a book -- and worse, one titled "Works."
Good stuff. I guess I’ll add this-there is plenty of great art and artists. And writing and writers. The question you raise is what is elevated for mass consumption—what can we actually find and see. capitalism can make the great popular. It can also make trash popular. We have had fortunate eras from time to time where the former held true, perhaps due to patrons with good taste—I don’t pretend to know the answer. What I do know is that right now we don’t have a very good filter—such that one is more likely to pick up garbage at a bookstore, or see garbage at a major metropolitan art museum than one is to see greatness. I think economists would best describe this as a market failure, and I would hesitate to turn for solutions to anyone who would think jazz is part of such a market failure. The solution? I doubt there is one other than time.
Adorno is somewhat pompous and elitist in his approach to art. The distinction between high- and low-brow art is not that clear cut nor does it strictly follow broad or niche appeal. In the same vein as Adorno, Bourdieu argued that cultural winners couldn't be financial winners, but that's simply not true. You can make art and be financially successful.
I’m perfectly fine with a broad definition of art . I don’t think there is much point in denouncing someone like Jeff Koons or Tracy Emin as non artists. No they’re bad artists who exalt banality and mediocrity.On Adorno , I’d be careful. My memory of him is hazy but I remember my past impression was that he was actually rather incoherent. Even with what you cite, we’re supposed to think Schoenberg is THE exemplary modern artist because his art was “ autonomous “ but is he actually listenable? Great art can emerge within and from an existing tradition. I have the sense that Adorno thought art was supposed to challenge in some sense the status quo. He was far too sophisticated to be an advocate of agitprop but you get a sense he was what my film history professors called Brechtian . Art must be actively taken in a manner which aims for demystification. In this process the non passive observers consciousnesses is raised and his sense of the cultural contradictions
of capitalism raised.Ok that’s nice but it’s actually rather fanciful.Art comes out of any number of things and has varied effects and functions. Adorno like most Marxists is trying to create an ideology of art. Not necessary or even healthy!
"Even with what you cite, we’re supposed to think Schoenberg is THE exemplary modern artist because his art was “ autonomous “ but is he actually listenable?"
Testimony from a non-musician: I've listened to him often enough and found something interesting in his music, even enjoyed some of it, even among his thorniest serial pieces (the 3rd and 4th quartets, for example). However, I consider him highly overrated and have to be in the mood for any of it. (For the first six months or so after my ear cracked his code, as it were, when I was 22 or so, I listened to him compulsively. Then I simply stopped. Of the big three in his line, I might add, Berg is better and more listenable, though Webern I find worse.) Serialism can have subtle effects once a sense of tonal center has been dissolved, but usually, especially among his academic epigones, there's not much else on offer. In any case, there's so much else in 20th century classical music that I prefer to seek out, and in a more comprehensive view I think Kyle Gann has it right--serialism is a limited technique, not a fundamental revolution in music: https://www.kylegann.com/PC050320-Once-More-into-12-tone.html
Good to see a young person see through Adorno's mire.
However, that is past. The Left has collapsed and its destructive ideas shown for what they are.
More important, is rebuilding. That can only be done by learning from the traditions of the past, refreshed and renewed: the creation of those new works based on far better ideas which supplant these grotesque perversions flooding museums, the airwaves, the poetry journals, the theater, etc.
Thanks for the outstanding column! And introducing me to Adorno.
For better or worse, 'art' is whatever the 'art world' says is art. There are no standards.
When I was a university student, 'Living Theater' was the rage. Critics loved the fact that the actors became their characters, the script was minimal, the audience was directly part of the action.
I thought it would be great to write an MFA thesis on Professional Wrestling as the Epitome of Living Theater, since it met all the definitions, except it was an extremely popular, non-elitist version of it. Unfortunately, I enjoy thinking but not writing.
I recently shared my thoughts about Living Theater with a professional wrestler that I know. He commented that he saw his profession as being an actor in Theater in the Round, but he had to reach the audience in the furthest seats in a large sports arena.
A thought - rather than referring to our society as 'Capitalist', an economic system, consider referring to it as an 'Open Society' that encourages individual inquiry and expression. For more, read any of Karl Popper's political works, but especially 'The Open Society and It's Enemies'.
After reading some of your previous articles, I had made up my mind that your arguments lacked nuance; this demonstrates a truth quite to the contrary.
I still can't fathom a world where Joyce's aesthetic choices are reducible to mistake or the political divorced from aestetic expression, but your insights here are such delicious food for thought.
You criticize Marxism above all else, it seems. I do not consider myself a Communist by any stretch of the word, but my own observations lead me to believe that Marx's dialectical materialist framework is instrumental in promoting greater overall social welfare, even in the context of an ever changing political arena. In the United States this is generally accepted as ideally: a. Direct Democracy, (which we have to a limited extent in the form of free expression, referendums on ballots, etc.,) and b. Representative Democracy (which by all appearances is a corrupt institution due to current liscentiousness to unchecked spending by ultra-powerful people and their self-serving agendas).
Anywho, I am sure I will enjoy disagreeing with you again, and take pleasure in your wonderful intellect.
Defining "high" and "low" in arts is tricky. The boundaries risk being arbitrary and subjective. I don't, for example, agree with Adorno that all music composed before 1910 is "limited by the contradictions of early bourgeois culture".
A clearer definition is between arts intended to succeed in the marketplace and those that don't have to because they're supported by the House of Esterhazy or a PEN/Faulkner Award or the culture-washing division of a global opioid manufacturer. The marketplace arts are not necessarily aesthetically inferior: Shakespeare and Dickens succeeded in the marketplace, whereas public arts funding is more likely to yield "The lights going on and off" than the next Gainsborough.
I believe the marketplace, and by extension the taste of the public, can be trusted more than elites typically think. Vox populi vox Dei and all that, but also Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen do make money.
Where "the culture industry" is an issue is on the supply side - not content, but availability. There's nothing wrong with superhero movies, but it's not great if they're the only thing on at the local theatre. Taylor Swift isn't at fault for being every third track your algorithm offers, nor for it never offering you Duke Ellington.
I remain optimistic that an efficient market will correct for this. You're always within arm's reach of a Coke, but other beverages are still available.
This is a fascinating dive into the tension between commodification and creativity. The banana-on-the-wall saga felt like the perfect symbol of this absurd moment we’re living in — where the boundary between art and parody has been duct-taped beyond recognition. But maybe that’s the point?!
Adorno’s critiques definitely resonate, though I’ve always found his blanket dismissal of jazz a bit ironic. Jazz, at its best, is a rebellion against formula, constantly improvising and reinventing itself — a living contradiction to his argument. It’s like condemning the entire genre because you only listened to the elevator music version.
Your point about capitalism isn’t lost on me either. It’s easy to vilify the system when we see endless superhero sequels and chart-topping songs that feel like déjà vu. But capitalism also gave us independent platforms, niche artists, and movements that wouldn’t exist otherwise. It’s not just about the machine — it’s about what we choose to engage with.
Maybe art’s biggest challenge today isn’t the system, but our willingness to sit with discomfort, to reflect deeply, and to embrace what doesn’t immediately gratify. Because, let’s be honest, sometimes the urinal is just a urinal — but other times, it’s a mirror we didn’t know we needed.
Speaking both as a musician and a music teacher, I think part of the 'decline,' we're seeing has to do with a move away from focusing on a knowledge of craft and technique which stems from the "gotta have it now" mentality and the lack of focus and discipline that goes with it. The post-modern idea of "anything can be art" and "anyone can be an artist" allows for a lot of experimentation and play to be sure, but there's more importance being put on output rather than the quality of that output through skill building and mastery.
Your comment about Marvel movies made me laugh. Several years ago, when Marvel was still popular amongst my students, a new movie was coming out. My students were excited to see it. I told them I already knew the plot. They all shouted at me: "No! No! Don't spoil it!" And I ignored them.
I explained that 1) the movie would open with an action scene that shows how awesome our hero is, then 2) a new villain will appear who's stronger than the other ones our hero has faced. 3) Our hero will try to fight the villain, but fail. And 4) through some combination of teamwork/hard work/creative thinking, our hero will finally defeat the villain at the end.
My students just stared at me, then laughed. "Yeah, I guess they're all kind of the same," they realized.
It strikes me that we are talking about two separate things when we complain about the commodification to mass art (art for mass consumption) and also about the idiocy of modern art. The average person looks at a signed urinal and decides this is stupid, which is why the vast majority of modern art is disdained by the vast majority of people. The reason there is any market at all for modern art is because there is a community of (mostly wealthy, mostly well-educated, often left-wing) types who want to signal their disdain of both “good taste” and “average art.” They intentionally like art which exists solely to defy convention and to “prove” that beauty is a myth and aesthetics are meaningless. I don’t blame capitalism for that, but rather the intentional project on the part of some to reject both traditional aesthetic criteria, and consumerism (to prove that they’re “cultured”).
This isn’t original to me, but a lot of the complaints about mass culture are the same as the complaints going back centuries that the rich had about how poor people have bad taste. When you got an age that produced more democratic art (ie art for the majority population, not just the elites), you ended up with a lot of the cheap, low-brow stuff people disdain as “mass culture.” Why? Because capitalism gives people what they want and this actually does represent what the average human being wants. Most elites can’t come out and say they are snobs who look down on the taste of the poor, because they have to pretend that they’re on the side of the working man/proletariat (including to themselves). But the truth is that the fault isn’t capitalism, but human nature. Not everyone is intelligent or cultured or sophisticated. Like it or hate it, this is what we are.
Finally, Irving Kristol pointed out that the communist countries never produced good communist art. All the good socialist/communist art was produced in capitalist countries. It turns out capitalism really does work better than anything short of oligarchy (Rome, medieval Europe, etc.) at producing art. If more art is produced to meet a growing market for art consumption, the average art will be average, some art will be bad, and some subset of it will be good.
Agreed. Blaming the decline in Art on capitalism is lazy. There are always forces looking to take advantage of whatever captures public attention. As you mentioned, this happens as well in communist countries. The difference is that, in capitalist societies, people still had the freedom to create, and no one knew in advance what was going to trend.
To me, the downfall is simply because we produce less exciting new art. In the 50s and 60s, the US and France were capitalist, but it saw the rise of “New Hollywood” and the French New Wave in Cinema. Capitalists profited from it but it was at least interesting, original art. I explore that more in my article but maybe there comes a time where all the “low hanging fruits” are gone it’s just really hard to make something new, profound and relevant within a certain medium.
I think there's something to that idea that the low-hanging fruit is gone. So much of music and "literature" produced today are just imitations of what was innovative in the 60s and 70s. But on the flip side, that means that the bar for greatness is higher, and if people keep trying and keep taking risks, eventually someone will produce something that clears that bar and is truly innovative. If the easy innovations are gone, the innovations that are yet to come will be that much more important.
Yes, that's also what I'm hoping for. It could also lead to a completely new form of Art that we're not imagining yet (AI/virtual interactive story telling… who knows).
By the way, the repetitiveness is even worse in Cinema. Last year, literally ALL the top 10 box office hits were sequels, prequels or remakes.
Great essay, thanks. 2 points:
1: Adorno apparently wants art that shows truth about life, but is without reference to politics, economics or any of the other things people care about in life. That strikes me as a problem.
2: I wouldn’t blame capitalism for Marvel slop; the market is punishing them pretty hard for their inability to make movies people want to watch. One might debate why they are such garbage the past 10 years, but definitely capitalism is not to blame for their Marxist creators.
I can’t comment on Taylor Swift… my wife likes her stuff, but it all sounds the same to me, as my music does to her. I can only assume she has terrible taste.
We all share a sense there is a problem with modernity. Adorno deals with the problem by drawing distinctions between "high art" and "low art," but his arguments are not forceful. I recommend Baudrillard's powerful essays about commodification and representation (aka, "simulacra.")
Duchamp's urinal (titled "Fountain") was the essence of Dada, the revelation of nonsense in the heart of efforts to take ourselves seriously. It's a cheap place to hang out. I think a lot of people have missed the joke. I find something worthwhile in an artist's careful, exploratory pursuit of abstraction, but that is a far cry from a banana taped to a wall.
For all his faults, Theodor Adorno was correct! There is such a thing as good art and bad art! Adorno is wrong to blame capitalism at least 100% for the decline in the quality of art over the past couple centuries. The half of the story was a movement called Impressionism. It at first simply loosened artistic standards but retained some elements of discipline. The first two generations of the movement were unbelievable and gave us geniuses like Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin. But over time it devolved into not merely loosening artistic standards but doing away with them altogether. Thus we arrive at where we are today where a bag of feces, a giant carving of someone’s rear end, a banana taped to a canvas, some cinder blocks, a bench, or a pair of glasses dropped on the floor is considered art. Here’s the problem with that, if everything is art than nothing is art. If art becomes so subjective it can be literally anything that defeats the whole purpose of art in the first place. Art is supposed to be beautiful, stand out from the ordinary and be something to behold. A pencil dropped on the floor and broken in half, a Kleenex full of boogers or a toilet is NOT art! The Mona Lisa, the Scream or Van Gogh’s Starry Night. That is art! Also, Adorno could not have been more right that art is NOT supposed to be universal or appeal to everyone. Everyone is NOT supposed to understand it! That’s the whole point! It’s supposed to introduce you to new ideas and new ways of seeing the world and make you think long after you’ve left the gallery or the museum! You’re absolutely right Liza, we need to consume art critically and parse out the quality stuff from the junk. For instance if we’re talking about film, examples of good art would be Frankenstein, Dracula, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, The Seventh Seal, The Wizard of Oz, George C. Scott’s version of A Christmas Carol, The Maltese Falcon, the Original Star Wars Trilogy, The Great Dictator, The Invisible Man, Modern Times, The Battle of Algiers, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and the original Godzilla. Examples of Bad Art would be Howard the Duck, Gigli, the Garbage Pail Kids, Battlefield Earth, Planet 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda?, Baby Geniuses, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. In terms of literature, examples of good art would be The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Cask of Amontillado, The Raven, Go Down, Moses, The Sound and the Fury, Two Soldiers, Intruder in the Dust, The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears A Who, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, King Lear, The Flea, To Kill A Mockingbird, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and I Heard A Fly Buzz. Examples of bad art would be Bad Feminist, Orientialism, Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching, The Hate U Give, and American Dirt. In Music, examples of good art would be: Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Motzart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Al Jolson, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Louie Armstrong, Count Basie, Jelly Roll Morton, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Whitney Houston, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Prince, Phil Collins, Selena, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patsy Cline, Dean Martin, Frank Zappa, and Roy Orbison. Examples of bad art would be Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Selena Gomez, Rihanna, Pitbull, Will I Am, Fergie, Jacob Satorious, Kendrick Lamar, Miley Cyrus, and Kesha. Phenomenal article worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, Liza!
OTOH, one should be very, very wary of looking at the writers of today and assuming that pop-culture disqualifies some from this category. Plays in the Elizabethan era were pop-culture and Ben Jonson was decried as foolish and arrogant for putting out his plays in a book -- and worse, one titled "Works."
Good stuff. I guess I’ll add this-there is plenty of great art and artists. And writing and writers. The question you raise is what is elevated for mass consumption—what can we actually find and see. capitalism can make the great popular. It can also make trash popular. We have had fortunate eras from time to time where the former held true, perhaps due to patrons with good taste—I don’t pretend to know the answer. What I do know is that right now we don’t have a very good filter—such that one is more likely to pick up garbage at a bookstore, or see garbage at a major metropolitan art museum than one is to see greatness. I think economists would best describe this as a market failure, and I would hesitate to turn for solutions to anyone who would think jazz is part of such a market failure. The solution? I doubt there is one other than time.
Adorno is somewhat pompous and elitist in his approach to art. The distinction between high- and low-brow art is not that clear cut nor does it strictly follow broad or niche appeal. In the same vein as Adorno, Bourdieu argued that cultural winners couldn't be financial winners, but that's simply not true. You can make art and be financially successful.
I’m perfectly fine with a broad definition of art . I don’t think there is much point in denouncing someone like Jeff Koons or Tracy Emin as non artists. No they’re bad artists who exalt banality and mediocrity.On Adorno , I’d be careful. My memory of him is hazy but I remember my past impression was that he was actually rather incoherent. Even with what you cite, we’re supposed to think Schoenberg is THE exemplary modern artist because his art was “ autonomous “ but is he actually listenable? Great art can emerge within and from an existing tradition. I have the sense that Adorno thought art was supposed to challenge in some sense the status quo. He was far too sophisticated to be an advocate of agitprop but you get a sense he was what my film history professors called Brechtian . Art must be actively taken in a manner which aims for demystification. In this process the non passive observers consciousnesses is raised and his sense of the cultural contradictions
of capitalism raised.Ok that’s nice but it’s actually rather fanciful.Art comes out of any number of things and has varied effects and functions. Adorno like most Marxists is trying to create an ideology of art. Not necessary or even healthy!
"Even with what you cite, we’re supposed to think Schoenberg is THE exemplary modern artist because his art was “ autonomous “ but is he actually listenable?"
Testimony from a non-musician: I've listened to him often enough and found something interesting in his music, even enjoyed some of it, even among his thorniest serial pieces (the 3rd and 4th quartets, for example). However, I consider him highly overrated and have to be in the mood for any of it. (For the first six months or so after my ear cracked his code, as it were, when I was 22 or so, I listened to him compulsively. Then I simply stopped. Of the big three in his line, I might add, Berg is better and more listenable, though Webern I find worse.) Serialism can have subtle effects once a sense of tonal center has been dissolved, but usually, especially among his academic epigones, there's not much else on offer. In any case, there's so much else in 20th century classical music that I prefer to seek out, and in a more comprehensive view I think Kyle Gann has it right--serialism is a limited technique, not a fundamental revolution in music: https://www.kylegann.com/PC050320-Once-More-into-12-tone.html
Serialism is the ACDC of classical music.
When you've heard one track you've heard them all.
Good to see a young person see through Adorno's mire.
However, that is past. The Left has collapsed and its destructive ideas shown for what they are.
More important, is rebuilding. That can only be done by learning from the traditions of the past, refreshed and renewed: the creation of those new works based on far better ideas which supplant these grotesque perversions flooding museums, the airwaves, the poetry journals, the theater, etc.
Thanks for the outstanding column! And introducing me to Adorno.
For better or worse, 'art' is whatever the 'art world' says is art. There are no standards.
When I was a university student, 'Living Theater' was the rage. Critics loved the fact that the actors became their characters, the script was minimal, the audience was directly part of the action.
I thought it would be great to write an MFA thesis on Professional Wrestling as the Epitome of Living Theater, since it met all the definitions, except it was an extremely popular, non-elitist version of it. Unfortunately, I enjoy thinking but not writing.
I recently shared my thoughts about Living Theater with a professional wrestler that I know. He commented that he saw his profession as being an actor in Theater in the Round, but he had to reach the audience in the furthest seats in a large sports arena.
A thought - rather than referring to our society as 'Capitalist', an economic system, consider referring to it as an 'Open Society' that encourages individual inquiry and expression. For more, read any of Karl Popper's political works, but especially 'The Open Society and It's Enemies'.
Wasn't this all settled in 1920?
After reading some of your previous articles, I had made up my mind that your arguments lacked nuance; this demonstrates a truth quite to the contrary.
I still can't fathom a world where Joyce's aesthetic choices are reducible to mistake or the political divorced from aestetic expression, but your insights here are such delicious food for thought.
You criticize Marxism above all else, it seems. I do not consider myself a Communist by any stretch of the word, but my own observations lead me to believe that Marx's dialectical materialist framework is instrumental in promoting greater overall social welfare, even in the context of an ever changing political arena. In the United States this is generally accepted as ideally: a. Direct Democracy, (which we have to a limited extent in the form of free expression, referendums on ballots, etc.,) and b. Representative Democracy (which by all appearances is a corrupt institution due to current liscentiousness to unchecked spending by ultra-powerful people and their self-serving agendas).
Anywho, I am sure I will enjoy disagreeing with you again, and take pleasure in your wonderful intellect.
Defining "high" and "low" in arts is tricky. The boundaries risk being arbitrary and subjective. I don't, for example, agree with Adorno that all music composed before 1910 is "limited by the contradictions of early bourgeois culture".
A clearer definition is between arts intended to succeed in the marketplace and those that don't have to because they're supported by the House of Esterhazy or a PEN/Faulkner Award or the culture-washing division of a global opioid manufacturer. The marketplace arts are not necessarily aesthetically inferior: Shakespeare and Dickens succeeded in the marketplace, whereas public arts funding is more likely to yield "The lights going on and off" than the next Gainsborough.
I believe the marketplace, and by extension the taste of the public, can be trusted more than elites typically think. Vox populi vox Dei and all that, but also Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen do make money.
Where "the culture industry" is an issue is on the supply side - not content, but availability. There's nothing wrong with superhero movies, but it's not great if they're the only thing on at the local theatre. Taylor Swift isn't at fault for being every third track your algorithm offers, nor for it never offering you Duke Ellington.
I remain optimistic that an efficient market will correct for this. You're always within arm's reach of a Coke, but other beverages are still available.
This is a fascinating dive into the tension between commodification and creativity. The banana-on-the-wall saga felt like the perfect symbol of this absurd moment we’re living in — where the boundary between art and parody has been duct-taped beyond recognition. But maybe that’s the point?!
Adorno’s critiques definitely resonate, though I’ve always found his blanket dismissal of jazz a bit ironic. Jazz, at its best, is a rebellion against formula, constantly improvising and reinventing itself — a living contradiction to his argument. It’s like condemning the entire genre because you only listened to the elevator music version.
Your point about capitalism isn’t lost on me either. It’s easy to vilify the system when we see endless superhero sequels and chart-topping songs that feel like déjà vu. But capitalism also gave us independent platforms, niche artists, and movements that wouldn’t exist otherwise. It’s not just about the machine — it’s about what we choose to engage with.
Maybe art’s biggest challenge today isn’t the system, but our willingness to sit with discomfort, to reflect deeply, and to embrace what doesn’t immediately gratify. Because, let’s be honest, sometimes the urinal is just a urinal — but other times, it’s a mirror we didn’t know we needed.
Speaking both as a musician and a music teacher, I think part of the 'decline,' we're seeing has to do with a move away from focusing on a knowledge of craft and technique which stems from the "gotta have it now" mentality and the lack of focus and discipline that goes with it. The post-modern idea of "anything can be art" and "anyone can be an artist" allows for a lot of experimentation and play to be sure, but there's more importance being put on output rather than the quality of that output through skill building and mastery.
Your comment about Marvel movies made me laugh. Several years ago, when Marvel was still popular amongst my students, a new movie was coming out. My students were excited to see it. I told them I already knew the plot. They all shouted at me: "No! No! Don't spoil it!" And I ignored them.
I explained that 1) the movie would open with an action scene that shows how awesome our hero is, then 2) a new villain will appear who's stronger than the other ones our hero has faced. 3) Our hero will try to fight the villain, but fail. And 4) through some combination of teamwork/hard work/creative thinking, our hero will finally defeat the villain at the end.
My students just stared at me, then laughed. "Yeah, I guess they're all kind of the same," they realized.