Culture Industry
Culture Industries is a term coined by critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), who argued in the final chapter of their book “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”; that popular culture is a factory producing standardised cultural goods through film, radio and magazines to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. Cultural industry on the other hand, is not really a value-based term. It merely refers to businesses involved in the production, sale, distribution and creation of works of creativity. While some individual businesses might determine certain goods necessitate mass production, other forms of the cultural industry are more highly selective.