Horkheimer made me think

And in the light of darkness we all fail. Even they fall down from the skies, they who thought they were mighty and above it all, pedestals fall. Everything breaks, that’s all humanity ever does is break apart what was once pure and light. Art is no longer art, is consumption, it’s sold back and forth. It’s status. You are not better for having that painting on your wall, you are better if you understand it and if you respect it. Words lost all meaning, not even the tenderest of them have feeling. It’s purely ridiculous to say I love you or I need you, it’s everywhere. People need things, they desire things, they overcompensate for their dead end jobs, for their own lacks and insecurities with objects. Wearable and tearable things and that is all humanity can ever do while under the power of capitalism. Use and throw away, everything is disposable, even people. Or maybe not people. Or maybe yes? We’re all confused in this sea of adverts telling us what we need, what we want, how and who we should be. We let corporations teach us how to live our lives and we don’t even realize how constrained we actually are in our choices. We have the illusion of choice with a million or more tracks on my itunes but they’re all the same, with movies being produced constantly with so many different topics but we miss the actual point, they’re all the same. They’re built to distract, to provide mindless entertainment. The viewer doesn’t need to think, it can guess what is coming next and is flattered when that happens (Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment.). Art itself has been transformed into a commodity and a way of stereotyping as well.

We need to fit in. We have this enormous urge, all of society, this amazing desire to be accepted. In order for that to happen, we better our chances by dipping into the mainstream pot of culture. Popular culture is now, more than ever, low culture. All of it is based on the same idea, all of it is identifiable and anything deriving from the norm is immediately set aside by people and by the system itself, by the culture industry. The point of music is no longer to make something great; something new but to make money and that is only a small by-product of the capitalist system in which we continue to be trapped without knowledge of the bars that surround us. If you derive in any way from the stereotype you are removed of the mainstream society, people themselves remove you, label you as “weird” and keep on living their sheep-like existences. This society is broken. People are broken just as much as the system is. If you want to change the system you need to start by changing people. People formed it, people asked for a uniformity, for an invisible prison of choice, for a beauty driven society, for a flat culture.