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ART AND ENTERTAINMENT
violent and uncompromising bodily sensations erotic – an escape from the simulated sexuality of contemporary culture. For Baudrillard, this confronting of fate transforms the highway accident into the ‘Accident’, an event that symbolically and ritually reconnects the body to the object. There is an enduring nostalgia in Baudrillard for a time of symbolic exchange when things meant something and when the subject was confronted by an object that resisted; when sex and fear rather than the simulation of sex and fear moved the body. What he despairs of is the realm of simulation in which so much pretence at reality keeps us from the simplicity of existence – but that is all we have, and there is no going back.
Conclusions Both art and entertainment represent the world we live in, allowing us an opportunity to stand back from the everyday and reflect on how things are and how they might be. Critical theory argues that in modernity the process of representation enters a new phase – of the culture industry, mechanical reproduction, of direct representation, of representation that precedes reality – that sustains the social order of advanced capitalism and threatens to slide towards even greater repression. But at the same time the possibility for a politicised reflection – of historical possibility, of the mass, of everyday experience, of the form of art itself – lies in a liberatory art that can be joyful and playful as well as being part of a praxis through which the world might be critiqued and even changed.
Summary
Adorno and Horkheimer: (1) Culture becomes an industry shaped by capital investment, business organisation and industrial processes to produce entertainment commodities to be sold in a market. (2) The authenticity of the individual and distinctive autonomous artwork, shaped within a tradition of the creative imagination of the artist that allows form to develop, is displaced by cultural products that have the same pre-formed structure, albeit embellished by features that give the appearance of variation and complexity. (3) The critical and polemical quality of art that stimulates its audience to imagine a world different from the one they experience gives way to a stultifying, repetitive and predictable form appealing to ‘fun’ and entertainment that encourages mass acceptance of the instrumental rationality of modernity without provoking the individual imagination. Benjamin: Mechanical reproduction (e.g. photography, film) destroys the traditional ‘aura’ of the artwork but produces new possibilities for critical awareness through, for example, the ‘dialectical image’, which allows the
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