In a similar vein, some theorists, reflecting on the growth of the global culture industry, claim that Adorno and Horkheimer’s worst nightmares have become true. The production of symbols is now a central goal of capitalism and through the development of the creative industries, individuals have become totally subjugated to the control of capital. Not only consumers but cultural producers too are prisoners of the culture industry dominated by the media and entertainment corporations and they have been transformed into passive functions of the capitalist system. Here, again, the possibility of an effective critique in a range of public spaces seems to have disappeared.
The central question that artists aiming at challenging the status-quo should ask is the following: how can artistic practices still play a critical role in societies in which every critical gesture is quickly recuperated and neutralized by the dominant powers? There is currently an important debate around this issue and a wide disagreement about the answer. There are those who argue that we are witnessing a ‘vaporization of art’, an aesthetization of all the forms of our existence. They declare that aesthetics has triumphed in all the realms and that the effect of this triumph has been the creation of a hedonistic culture where there is no place any more for art to provide any truly subversive experience. The blurring of the lines between art and advertizing is such that the idea of critical public spaces has lost its meaning, since we are now living in societies where even the public has become privatized.In a similar vein, some theorists, reflecting on the growth of the global culture industry, claim that Adorno and Horkheimer’s worst nightmares have become true. The production of symbols is now a central goal of capitalism and through the development of the creative industries, individuals have become totally subjugated to the control of capital. Not only consumers but cultural producers too are prisoners of the culture industry dominated by the media and entertainment corporations and they have been transformed into passive functions of the capitalist system. Here, again, the possibility of an effective critique in a range of public spaces seems to have disappeared.
According to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that foments dissensus. It is constituted by manifold artistic practices, whose objective should be the transformation of political identities by the creation of new practices and languages games that will mobilize affects in a way that allows for the disarticulation of the framework in which current forms of identification are taking place, so as to allow for other forms of identifications to emerge.
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