Culture Industry Today

After reading about the culture industry from Adorno's point of view, I couldn't help but think of another class I'm in. Right now I'm taking JOUR 3745: Mass Media and Popular Culture. In this class we talk a lot about popular culture (hence the class name) and one thing we talked about was high culture and low culture, which I think Adorno gets at quite often. He says on page one "To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years", and I agree with him in this sense, but I can also disagree. I still believe there's a distinguished line between high art and low art, high culture and low culture. But I do think that the culture industry tries to mold the two together. He says that the "seriousness of high art is destroyed" and I can agree to that as well. Another point that Adorno talks about is advertising. In my journalism class we watched a documentary called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" and it heavily emphasized advertisement in movies. It showed that once advertisement gets involved in a film they can end up having high power over how the film is made. Adorno says on page 100 that "Brought to bear is a general uncritical consensus, advertisements produced for the world, so that each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement", and after watching the documentary on movies and advertisement within them I find this statement to be very very true.