Against popular culture

For Adorno, popular culture is not just bad art – it enslaves us to repetition and robs us of our aesthetic freedom

"Popular culture, for Adorno, is not bad because it provides us with quick and accessible pleasure in a way that modern, demanding ‘high art’ does not. On the contrary, it is bad because it promises this pleasure and fails to deliver it in a genuine way. Adorno’s attack on the culture industry turns out, in the end, not to be an attack on pleasure, but an attack in the name of pleasure. In a letter to fellow philosopher Walter Benjamin, he referred to high and low culture as two ‘torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up’. Popular culture gives us pleasure, which is our need and our right; but it comes along with harm to our ability to think freely and truly take ourselves out of the world of work and profit. High culture creates, at its best, works of art that give us true aesthetic freedom and escape from labour. But these artworks come with high barriers to entry, that help to close off the perfect conditions for experiencing such art to all but the few. To attend a performance of a symphony takes not only money, but also time, and freedom from immediate needs and anxieties – it requires an insulation against worries about money, food and security that are increasingly unavailable in a world where employment becomes ever more precarious and less well-paid."