ABSTRACT
Culture is subsumed into the process of capitalist consumption, becoming little more than an advertisement for itself. While in many ways different, public monuments and works of high culture have one thing in common: they exude an air of authority and tend to be used to instruct and inform the public. The constructive and creative potential of kitsch and nostalgia have also been identified by Svetlana Boym in relation to wider trends in post-Soviet/post-socialist culture. As Erica Lehrer suggests, it is possible to see the relationship between cultural memory and consumer/mass culture as a complex phenomenon that brings with it possibilities as well as problems. Theodor Adorno’s insight into the convergence of cultural production and consumerism is instructive: literature, art and other forms of expression coalesce with the heritage and tourist industries in the commercialization of the past, and this nexus is a key feature of contemporary urban memory cultures.
