ABSTRACT
Also on the economic front, nineteenth-century Europe saw the increasing subjection of the artist and the writer to the commercial imperative. In this context, and with the emergence of new technologies such as lithography, photography, film, and sound recording, some theorists and critics came to define art in contradistinction to the commercial. In his famous 1938 essay, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” Theodor Adorno rejected the politicaleconomic basis of the new mass media, which turned the engagement with art away from its usevalue and toward the “fetish character of commodities.” In the first half of the twentieth century, Adorno could define art as the process through which the individual gains freedom by externalizing himself, in contrast to the philistine “who craves art for what he can get out of it.” Today it is nearly impossible to find public statements that do not recruit instrumentalized art and culture, whether to better social conditions, as in the creation of multicultural tolerance and civic participation though UNESCO-like advocacy for cultural citizenship and cultural rights, or to spur economic growth through urban cultural development projects and the concomitant proliferation of museums for cultural tourism, epitomized by the increasing number of Guggenheim franchises.
