In this first section some of the different conceptions of the cultural industry will be brought together in order to create a compilation of the different ideas that illustrate the complexity of the term for Theodor Adorno.
Like this, at a first place it will be described the idea of cultural industry as a factor that made possible for art to become a consumer good, understanding art also like the catharsis it offers.
Cultural Industry and Consumer Goods
Theodor Adorno explains in “a Critic to the Cultural Industry”, section of the book “Aesthetic Theory” published in 1970, that as far as art corresponds to a social manifested necessity, it transforms itself mostly in a business governed by the profit, which persists as long as it is profitable. And by doing so, art makes itself aside, confirming being nothing but something already dead (Adorno, 1970, p. 34).
Adorno exposes the means used by the cultural industry in order to convert art pieces into merchandise when he makes clear that the ‘naïve’ people of the cultural industry, avid of merchandise, locate themselves closer to art because they perceive how art is inadequate to accompany the process of social life. Adorno argues that the creation of this proximity with art only intensifies the profit of the cultural industry, as well as, here the idea of the immediatism of art to the society is planned to deceive (Adorno, 1970, p. 376). At the same time the cultural industry defends that art suffered a process in which it ceases being what it is and loses its specificity becoming consumer goods like art pieces and catharsis (Adorno, 1970, p. 34).
In the following paragraphs we will then explain how for Adorno the art and its catharsis become consumer goods.