linguistic:translation
Mass culture

The culture industry argument is often assumed to be fundamentally pessimistic in nature because its purveyors seem to condemn "mass media" and their consumers. However, for Adorno, the term "culture industry" does not refer to "mass culture", or the culture of the masses of people in terms of something being produced by the masses and conveying the representations of the masses. On the contrary, such involvement of the masses is only apparent, or a type of seeming democratic participation. Adorno contends that what is actually occurring is a type of "defrauding of the masses". Horkheimer and Adorno deliberately chose the term "culture industry" instead of "mass culture" or "mass media". "The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises." The culture industry even encroaches upon the small distractions of leisure activity: "Amusement has become an extension of labor under late capitalism." Horkheimer and Adorno, above all, in their critical analyses, delve into what they call "the fraying of art" and the "de-artification of art", and discuss how the arts are defused by the culture industry. Works of art have become commodified: Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner are only used in fragmentary forms when included in advertisement. According to Critical Theory, "selling out" is not the decisive factor involved, but rather it's the manner in which art is commodified and how art and culture are changed that is the crucial issue.