Films
Film as a Subversive Art
Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 (2003)
The principle of idealistic aesthetics - purposeless without a purpose - reverses the scheme of things to which bourgeois art conforms socially: purposelessness for the purposes declared by the market. The work of art, by completely assimilating itself to the need of the market, 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. Everything is looked at from only one aspect: that it can be used for something else.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightment