Art et culture de masse chez Adorno et Arendt ?

Abstract

The paper will first consider Adorno's critique of the culture industry, then we will present Arendt's distinction between art and entertainment to ease the Frankfurt critique on mass culture and maintain its essential insights. Following Arendt, the paper's working hypothesis claims that the variety of mass culture or popular culture can be better understood if it is correlated to a need for amusement and entertainment that must be basically distinguished from art as intellectual orientation. It will be argued that it is possible and fruitful to make a difference between high culture and popular culture, not in the sense of a gradual difference, but as a difference in kind.