Ideas Matter: Culture Wars, then and now, episode 6: 'The culture of disenchantment'

Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry argued
that movies and mass-produced entertainment represented the
‘de-artification’ or commodification of art by capitalism: an
inauthentic and formulaic regurgitation of reality that deceived
its audiences. The real thing was difficult and hard to
understand: modernism separated itself off from mass culture in
order to try and save high culture. Heidegger, too, argued that
we had become enchanted with technology and needed to find a way
back to beauty. Postmodernism took up the debate the other way –
looking to debunk the authority of high culture with the irony of
kitsch and the elevation of the everyday – moving from
abstraction to art as a construct glorifying the role of the
artist. Either way, the disenchantment of culture has left us
with an ongoing war between low and high, new and old.


LECTURER Angus Kennedy, author, Being Cultured: in defence of
discrimination; co-editor (with James Panton), From Self to
Selfie: a critique of contemporary alienation.


BIBLIOGRAPHY ‘The crisis in culture: it’s social and political
significance’ in Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt,
Penguin Books (1977)


‘The origin of the work of art’ in Basic Writings by Martin
Heidegger, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008


THE ACADEMY 2019 In the context of today’s instrumental
approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest
attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth
of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the
pursuit of truth.


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