and in "The Culture Industry," a chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment. There Adorno argues that the culture industry involves a change in the commodity character of art, such that art's commodity character is deliberately acknowledged and art "abjures its autonomy" (DE 127). With its emphasis on marketability, the culture industry dispenses entirely with the "purposelessness" that was central to art's autonomy. Once marketability becomes a total demand, the internal economic structure of cultural commodities shifts. Instead of promising freedom from societally dictated uses, and thereby having a genuine use value that people can enjoy, products mediated by the culture industry have their use value replaced by exchange value: "Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation [gesellschaftliche Schätzung] which they mistake for the merit [Rang] of works of art— becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy" (DE 128). Hence the culture industry dissolves the "genuine commodity character" that artworks once possessed when exchange value still presupposed use value (DE 129-30).
plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry has done nothing other than destroy the value of art by pulling it into daily life. ...
http://books.google.gr/books?id=sa9A9h3ZicAC&lpg=PA38&ots=Mj...

With the cheapness of mass-produce luxury goods and its complement, the universal swindle, a change in the character of the art commodity itself is coming about. What is new is not that it is a commodity, but that today it deliberately admits it is one; that art renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumption goods constitutes the charm of novelty.
The use which men in this antagonistic society promise themselves from the work of art is itself, to a great extent, that very existence of the useless which is abolished by complete inclusion under use. The work of art, by completely assimilating itself to need, deceitfully deprives men of precisely that liberation from the principle of utility which it should inaugurate. What might be called use value in the reception of cultural commodities is replaced by exchange value; in place of enjoyment there are gallery-visiting and factual knowledge: the prestige seeker replaces the connoisseur.
No object has an inherent value; it is valuable only to the extent that it can be exchanged. The use value of art, its mode of being, is treated as a fetish; and the fetish, the work's social rating (misinterpreted as its artistic status) becomes its use value — the only quality which is enjoyed.
http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/SWA/Culture_in...

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Note added at 1 ημέρα23 ώρες (2010-01-26 18:20:13 GMT)
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value of art...

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Note added at 1 ημέρα23 ώρες (2010-01-26 18:27:41 GMT)
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According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry has done nothing other
than destroy the value of art by pulling it into daily life. ...
http://books.google.gr/books?id=sa9A9h3ZicAC&lpg=PA38&dq=ado...

http://books.google.gr/books?id=ERd-xtVWhdoC&lpg=PA25&dq=ado...

... of mass culture Critics of mass culture argue that it debases the value of
art. ... argued with Max Horkheimer in 1944 that such debasement of art is a ...
http://books.google.gr/books?id=wVNWTrtfv_UC&lpg=PA24&dq=ado...