Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption - Monoskop

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music as well as the arts in general under advanced capitalism: their rampant commodification and the effective
abolition of the traditional subject of aesthetic experience. By "commodification" Adorno means the organized
process whereby the arts are alientated from their primary and traditional status as a use-value, an object of aesthetic
experience, and become an exchange value, an object whose character is determined first and foremost by its relation
to the market. In the case of music, examples of commodification abound. For example, there are the insidious hit
tunes, all written according to formula and devoid of any intrinsic musical quality. They are composed for easy
listening and do not attempt to place demands on the listener (thus, the "regression of listening"). For the sake of the
largest possible sales, they attempt to appeal to as wide a spectrum of listeners as possible. This also means keeping
all substance to a minimum, while perhaps allowing for the inclusion of a catchy phrase here or there, so that the
consumer will remember this song when he or she goes to the marketplace.
In addition, there is the growing cult of musical "stars," the beneficiaries of a totally artificial and contrived buildup
on the part of the industry. The result is that the specific quality of this or that individual song ceases to matter (not
that it exists anyway), and it is purchased merely for the sake of the name of the artist. Art thereby regresses to cult in
the full-fledged totemic sense of the word. It becomes nothing more than a fetish, part of the logic of
commodification or the "fetishism of commodities" in Marx's sense. It is purchased for its cult valuethe value it
acquires by virtue of its commercial status or popularity, and no longer for its intrinsic merits as an aesthetic object.
A new genre of Gebrauchsmusik in the service of capitalism also emerges: commercial jingles and background
music for films and radio shows. The staggering extent to which all music is sacrificed to the demands of the
commodity form is further dramatized by the fact that even so-called "serious music" has been incorporated into the
all-embracing clutches of industry: "Whoever still delights in the beautiful passages of a Schubert quartet or even in
the provocatively healthy fare of a Handel concerto grosso ranks as a would-be guardian of culture among butterfly
collectors," 51
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