I am trying, this week, to come to terms with the reality of the ‘culture industry’ in my day to day life. It is still a distressing thought that my cultural indulgences are based almost entirely on the profit of someone else. Something that I find baffling, moreover, given the fact that Culture is no longer just the artistic personal expression of an individual or group, but a means for creating surplus value, is that Stephen Harper does not support the Arts wholeheartedly. One would think that the economic value of popular culture would occur to him on some level.
One of the criticisms of the theorists Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s notions about the culture industry is their cynicism regarding our ability to resist it. I think that the Internet, the impact of which these theorists and their contemporaries could not have foreseen, is providing us with means to create our own cultural reality, quite apart from that which is offered up by a few conglomerates.
My children, who regularly introduce me to independent musical artists, visit a website called Last.fm, which offers subscribers (I am aware of the irony) the opportunity to create their own radio station. Last.fm relies upon the same licensing laws that govern mainstream stations; they may not play the same artist more than five times in an hour, and they may not play one song over and over. The website also recommends artists similar to those the subscriber likes to listen to, both familiar and independent.
Through this alternative station, they have discovered artists like Movits, a hiphop/swing group who were obscure until they were featured on the Colbert report, and Zacke, both from Sweden. My boys’ cultural landscape is so far from the mainstream that they are unfamiliar with many currently popular artists. Maybe the issue of resistance isn’t about the fact that we are spending money to support culture, but that we choose where our money will go.
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