The Culture Industry by Theodor Adorno
“The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture. A volume of Adorno's essays is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature.”
–Susan Sontag
One of the best know thinkers emerging from the Frankfurt School of critical theory,
Theodor Adorno'sThe Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Cultureis the best collection of his essays on the emergence and effects of mass culture and homogenization on human consciousness.
In this work, Adorno argues that the creation of a “culture industry” that turns cultural creations (especially art, but it can also be said of scientific research) into commodities for sale to the highest bidder. When it was written, he was accused of being an alarmist, but given the last fifty years that have brought us the privatization of public goods such as the university system (especially in the United States) and the “Disney-fication” and commercialization of fetishized and/or racialized differences, his work has taken on a new patina of truth.
A refugee from Nazi Germany during WWII, Adorno moved the Hollywood, California in the 1940's, and so he was able to foresee where the culture industry was headed.
It is well worth reading these essays, if only to read the original arguments for ideas that are now often bandied about in popular forums.