Relevant Media:
- This session ends by briefly considering branding and consumerism. Adam Curtis’ ‘The Century of the Self’ is a BBC series from 2002,
“about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.”
- Ain’t no subculture-member like an Irish subculture-member.
- Adorno’s ideas regarding standardisation apparently apply quite visibly to recent blockbuster movie trailers.
- Relatedly, this Slate article from 2013 argues that the reason Hollywood movies may seem formulaic, is that there is an actual formula, set out in “Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need”.
- The economic potential of Hollywood film is not in doubt. The 2018 feature film ‘Avengers: Infinity War’, based on Marvel Comics’ superhero characters originating in the 1960s has a total worldwide gross of $2 billion. The figure for 2012’s ‘The Avengers’ is $1.5 billion, and for 2015’s ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ $1.4 billion. These are 3 of the 10 highest grosses ever, the highest being 2019’s ‘Avengers: Endgame’ at $2.8 billion. Film critic James Rocchi considers the ‘Marvel-Industrial Complex’.
- Is pop music holding you hostage? This video from the PBS Idea Channel discusses, amongst other things, the marketing of songs to promote sales, and the power of cultural intermediaries to create value and meaning.
- Is culture a commodity like any other? Not in France, where the ‘Cultural Exception’ applies. Will the exception survive in the age of global streaming services?
- In a 2016 New Yorker article, music critic Alex Ross argued ‘The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming’
“Adorno believed that the greatest danger to American democracy lay in the mass-culture apparatus of film, radio, and television. Indeed, in his view, this apparatus operates in dictatorial fashion even when no dictatorship is in place: it enforces conformity, quiets dissent, mutes thought.”
Cultural Guide:
“During his regency (1647–1656), the most important Habsburg collector, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, assembled some 1400 paintings. This view of his gallery is likely fictitious in part because the high room with windows on the left is probably not exactly like any space that existed at the time. The size and proportions of some of the decoratively hung pictures have been altered, in reality, they could never have been hung in that combination. Here David Teniers, chamberlain, court painter and keeper of the archduke’s art collection, is accompanying the scholarly collector on a visit to his gallery.”
“The use as an advertising medium of illuminated lettering attached to the façades of prominent buildings appears to have begun in the 1890’s. Piccadilly Circus (or rather, its north-east side) has since become the citadel of illuminated advertising in London […] A very important stage in the Rake’s Progress in Piccadilly Circus was […] reached in 1908–10, when signs advertising goods not connected with the trade of the occupant were attached to Piccadilly Mansions.”