The mediation of art through the mass media

Seeking answers to the debates between those who support the Frankfurt School’s idea of a “culture industry” and those who find this belief a serious error, this thesis examines certain aspects of the conditions of the fine arts through the mass media, in a so called mass culture. This examination is pursued through two case studies:

1. Musical languages through the cinema. The history and interpretation of Argentinean tango and its cinema image arc examined.

2. Architecture in photographs—an art through another art. Ancient Greek buildings in postcards.

Through this analysis certain critical assumptions, attributes and oversimplifications about such a culture theory will be tested and questioned. If for Adorno taste is nowadays outmoded, for Bourdieu it works unconsciously, with no conscious control. If the “mass” lacks the knowledge required to analyze, think about and finally understand something of art, the media can provide programmes dedicated to the analysis of artworks and therefore knowledge concerning art—both object and concept. Reproduction and mediation are widely condemned but on the other hand, artworks are reproduced and mediated anyway—it is immanent in their character. Artworks are intended for many and therefore are already their own reproductions. Through the artwork’s immanent mediation, its every element

becomes its own other—changing both its sensual and objective arrangement.

Great works remain eloquent, even when reproduced or mediated. Aesthetic experience is only genuine when intimate: if philosophical analysis can account for the introduction to aesthetic experience, mediated knowledge from other institutions, including the media, can be seen as the actual invitation to it. The Adomian aesthetical experience—the possibility promised by art’s impossibility—can indeed be preserved through such mediation. Through the media, the

audience can glimpse art’s ever broken promise of happiness and that glimpse can be stimulative.

Reproductions carry the images of the artworks in various environments and conditions, underlying their autonomous character. During mediation, the social function of artworks may again be underestimated but their birth and value as social objects is boldly stressed. The initiated eye/ear can find the social in the autonomous reproduction or the autonomous in the mediated sociality. Because a sufficient amount of time has passed from the time of Adorno’s writings, the

experience of the viewers has been enriched both through their many media viewings and through their tourist wanderings. Both mediated and direct experiences have been added up to shape the contemporary audience’s understanding and response to the media messages.