Seling Culture and Culture Industry

When looking at both Selling Culture by Ohman and Culture Industry by Adorno and Horkheimer there are some similarities and differences in their idea of mass culture and what mass culture has become. In Adorno and Horkhimers' essay they talk about the idea of culture being a paradoxical commodity. That it is just becoming a way to make profit and that "it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used." Ohman agree with this point when he mentions that mass culture is a part of capitalist production but, maybe there is no way of separating the two. In the essay he says "When cultural experiences and bought and sold in market, propaganda becomes an expensive luxury for its producers, unless audiences want to consume and pay for it in preference to other experiences." This is where Adorno and Horkheimer would disagree with Ohman. Adorno and Horkheimer believed that mass culture is all just one big propaganda and a bunch of rubbish and that the only reason why people are even interested is because it so widely available and doesn't require any thinking on the part of the reader. However,Ohman makes a good point of critique, that if no one was interested in mass culture then no one would buy the magazines, listen to the music TV programs. He does however agree somewhat with Horkheimer and Adorno when he writes "To be sure, it means to keep society as a field open to its project of cultivation and has the power to do so through direct coercion up to a point." There need to be some initial interest in this pop culture from the people to begin with, but we, the people cannot escape from it as it surrounds us from every angle.
Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno are doing more of a critique of the capitalist society and more of a warning as to what could happen if we concentrate fully on mass production and mass consumption. They are telling us to take a step back and reflect back on what is happening. Ohman is more for capitalism. HE sees both the problems and the benefits of capitalism, including mass culture.