THEODOR ADORNO (1903-1969) AND THE CULTURE INDUSTRY Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) was born in the sun of Hollywood, beside the pools of Santa Monica, in the capital of mass culture designed to entertain and to (literally) stupefy the American public. It would...
CULTURE IN LOS ANGELES 1940-1950 The City of Angels has many names, or to be more correct, many variations of its Spanish name: El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula. The locals have their own names for the city: “L.A.” and the “City of...
The Historical Context of Abstract Expressionism The historical context of Abstract Expressionism can perhaps best be mapped out according to the theories of Pierre Bourdieu who coined the phrase “the field of cultural production.” What was the “field” which...
Re-reading “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin Part Two “What is aura actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. Decades after the...
Re-reading The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936 by Walter Benjamin Part One Also know as The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, this essay by Walter Benjamin has been published in three different versions. The...