A lot of the popular culture we consume these days is produced and distributed by large studios and record companies. Should that worry us? Are doomed to mediocre music, television, and film? Or even worse: are we doomed to songs, shows, and movies that secretly serve a hegemonic propaganda machine?

这似乎是西奥多·阿多诺所相信的。早在20世纪40年代，他和马克斯·霍克海默(Max Horkheimer)就他们所谓的“文化产业”(culture industry)发表了一篇相当激烈的文章。他们的争论很复杂，有时还用晦涩难懂的语言加以修饰——那就是你当年成名的原因!但其中心思想似乎是，大众文化的每一个产品都是为了维持现状，维持邪恶的资本主义制度。(“Automobiles, bombs, and movies,” they wrote, “keep the whole thing together.”)

Take the example of movies. Most films, Adorno says, try to convince us that capitalism is a fantastic thing, by showing people in trouble getting a helping hand. In the rare case where a movie shows things going badly, the point is to persuade us that resistance is futile, so we may as well not bother trying to protest. (I’m being charitable here and tidying up the argument; Adorno and Horkheimer prefer simply to contradict themselves, without explanation.) This isn’t an accident: on the contrary, movie studios deliberately produce such “rubbish.”

And so all movies are essentially the same, the differences between them being totally superficial. That’s why every single one of them is entirely predictable: “as soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten.” Movies are just a device for the studios to make money and for the state to get its propaganda out; they are not an art but just a business. Gone are the days when people made culture for the sake of culture!

That all sounds pretty rousing; the only problem is that it isn’t true. First, movies are not all identical, and they’re not all predictable. That was already true in Adorno’s age, which was the heyday of film noir (I defy anyone to predict the outcome of, say,The Big Sleep) and which had enjoyed classics likeThe Rules of the GameandThe Grand Illusion. There was no shortage of interesting, unpredictable movies in Adorno’s day, and there certainly isn’t in ours (I’d includeGet Out,Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,Blade Runner,The Big Lebowski,Stories We Tell, andDo the Right Thing; tell us some of your own favorites in the comments).

阿多诺也是在爵士乐的全盛时期写作的，爵士乐是最具创新性和最不可预测的艺术形式之一。(埃拉·菲茨杰拉德在1945年录制了《飞回家》。)面对这个问题，阿多诺和霍克海默只是决定假装爵士乐很无聊。他们把爵士乐称为“机器”;他们说它的创新仅仅是“伪个性”;他们轻蔑地谈论“标准化的爵士即兴演奏”，好像那是真的一样。

So Adorno and Horkheimer were profoundly mistaken about movies and popular songs: they are not all identical, and they are not all predictable. It’s also not the case that their sole ambition is to make money. It’s hard to imagine that Spike Lee’s only purpose in creating the masterpieceDo the Right Thingwas to earn a quick buck, or that Martin Scorsese directedThe Last Temptationin order to get himself a new Porsche.

最后，流行文化并不总是寻求巩固现状。如果你相信这一点，你需要听更多的性手枪和NWA。阿多诺有一个巧妙的方法来驳回这样的案件:它被称为诡辩。He knows that Charlie Chaplin’sGreat Dictatoris an anti-fascist movie, but he has to pretend it’s a failure like everything else, so he says that “the ears of corn blowing in the wind at the end of Chaplin’sThe Great Dictator揭穿了反法西斯争取自由的谎言他们就像德国女孩的金发，纳粹电影公司拍下了她在集中营的生活。”人们对这种铁一般的逻辑能说些什么呢?

None of this means, of course, that every movie, every TV show, or every song is a fabulous achievement: plenty of artworks, whether popular or otherwise, are uninspired and uninspiring. (I’m not about to defend Justin Bieber!) Further, some do indeed reproduce the ideology of the day, and even those that challenge the status quo can, at times, end up getting co-opted. And yes, some are driven or distorted by the profit motive: think of all those sequels, all that product placement. But this is far from being the whole of the story, and neither is it particularly new.

There has always been mediocre art, just as there have always been aesthetic constraints and incentives. (Adorno sometimes writes as though the situation before capitalism was a utopia—as though artists never had patrons, never performed for food, never pandered to the “groundlings,” never worked for the Church.) And yet there has also always been good art, in spite of everything. Even in the age of the big studio, there are still genuine artists out there, making genuinely great artworks, and for reasons other than greed. Some of these great artworks end up getting read, or seen, or heard by a higher percentage of the population than was ever possible in previous ages. Is it really all a catastrophe?