Organized Amusement - feat. Professor Lydia Goehr, Triple Canopy Symposium 2024

Organized Amusement
with Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, A. S. Hamrah, Blair McClendon, Lydia Goehr & Ciarán Finlayson

November 2, 2024

A discussion about the twilight of the culture industry eighty years after the publication of Adorno and Horkeimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Roulette
509 Atlantic Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11217

“The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry,” Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote in 1944, introducing a term that continues to define the production of art and media. Eighty years later, Organized Amusement revisits the question: what is the place of culture in the “administered world”? Revolutions in finance, telecommunications, and computing have transformed how culture is produced and consumed. Cinemas are giving way to streaming, and mass culture is yielding to algorithmic personalization. The Frankfurt School’s concerns—the prospect of mass murder facilitated by a malign system of “film, radio, and magazines”—are back in the news, and the scale and power of the culture industry have only grown. Given all that counts as (and all who labor in) culture, how might we respond to Adorno and Horkheimer’s injunction to take the industry “more seriously than it might itself wish to be”?

This event is part of the 2024 Triple Canopy Symposium, presented in partnership with Critical Minded.