Artur – Your Art

Edvard Munch’s The Scream, rooted in his panic attack and sense of abandonment, distills human anxiety and uncertainty. Art has the power to represent deep emotions and to critique oppressive aspects of society. Yet today it is often used to package products and sell merchandise, even on glowing billboards.

For example, the Grey Goose logo above. A scene of snow-capped mountains and white swans is depicted on the label. The setting lends the vodka a sense of purity that it lacks as a product widely regarded as impure. This is one of many cases in which art is used to manipulate the public for the benefit of companies whose only moral compass is profit.

Critical theory of art

Critical theory formulates critiques of society by exposing structures of domination and power. While art can serve as a critical tool, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that capitalism subverts art into an instrument of consumption.

They describe the rise of a ‘culture industry’ in which music, television, and visual arts are standardized as commodities, produced and sold for profit. This standardization, oriented toward profitability, helps maintain the dominant ideology.

Consequently, works that seem to criticize capitalism can, once formatted to entertain and sell, end up glorifying what they claim to denounce. Capitalism thus exploits artistic symbolism, which, instead of revealing power, becomes its conduit.

For example, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is a film that, on the surface, criticizes the capitalist urge to chase wealth at any cost, but in reality glorifies the life of Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who became rich through fraud. The culture industry took a true story about a man who made a fortune by stealing and turned it into an entertaining plot with a charismatic protagonist. The pursuit of profit required by capitalism compels producers to make a thriller with a main character the audience can envy. A documentary that teaches its audience how horrible greed is would not sell as well, because it would be less entertaining and less desirable to identify with the protagonist if he were given traits unpopular with the general public. By catering to the light entertainment preferences of a majority of consumers, the culture industry encourages art to support the dominant capitalist ideology instead of questioning it.

The culture industry in everyday life

In the street, on TV, on our phones—advertising is ubiquitous. Art is consumed without our noticing, making it harder to pause and critically reflect on it.

For Adorno and Horkheimer, advertising infests culture and reinforces individualist ideologies. The repetition of the same messages, driven by a few large companies, conditions the public and blurs the line between culture and commodity.

A classic example: De Beers’s slogan ‘A Diamond is Forever’ turned diamonds into symbols of eternal love and marriage, establishing a lasting cultural norm while boosting consumption.

Adorno and Horkheimer regarded advertising as a particularly insidious way of reinforcing individualist ideologies. They criticized the abundance of ads, claiming they infested culture. If every aspect of culture—music, cinema, television, and art—is alienated by advertising, no boundary remains between culture and commodities. Culture thus becomes a vehicle for driving consumption.

They also argued that advertisers’ techniques amount to psychological manipulation of consumers. They compared advertising to propaganda. The constant repetition of the same ads—coming from the few companies that can afford the rising cost of advertising—conditions consumers to accept what they are being sold. Catchy jingles prompt citizens to repeat the ads in their heads, carrying out companies’ orders themselves.

The use of diamond rings in marriage proposals, for example, became common thanks to a slogan. De Beers, a diamond company, used the phrase “A Diamond is Forever.” The slogan turned diamonds into symbols of true love and marriage—supposedly never‑ending. The slogan was even used in the title of a James Bond film, showing once again how ads and brands slip into culture and art. Now diamond rings are considered necessary for a proposal, which was not the case before. The poetry of the slogan was used to associate diamonds with love in consumers’ minds, and as a result diamond rings are purchased far more often.

Moreover, Adorno and Horkheimer believed that the cognitive overload imposed by ubiquitous advertising smothers critical thinking because it appeals to emotion rather than rationality. Consumers become passive, listening to companies that dictate what they should buy and what they should think about products. They even went so far as to say that our thoughts are so compromised by brands that we buy products even when we know we are being manipulated.

The subtle manipulation of art

We are surrounded by products wrapped in ‘artistic’ motifs. Aesthetics becomes a persuasive lever: it catches the eye, promises an experience, and steers desire without explicit rational argument.

The Warhol/Campbell’s case is telling: commemorative cans in ‘Warholian’ colors turned a critique of mass consumption into a marketing tool. The work, originally autonomous and critical, is reconfigured to sell more.

A growing trend among companies is to package their products in Andy Warhol’s artistic style. “Pop art” draws inspiration from his colorful, flamboyant look. The best‑known example is Campbell’s soup cans. In 1962, Andy Warhol painted 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans. Each can displayed a different flavor, but otherwise they were perfectly identical.

Warhol wanted the repetition to be blatant, both because he ate the same soup every day as a child and because he sought to criticize mass consumer culture.

On the 50th anniversary of Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), the company began selling cans wrapped in Warholian colors. Campbell’s soup was thus associated with art, and buying this soup was framed as a celebration of Warhol’s art. The company took Warhol’s work—which was meant to criticize capitalist consumption—and turned it into a weapon to spur even more consumption.

Adorno and Horkheimer made it clear that art tied to an economic function is deprived of its autonomy. Using Warhol’s works to package products degrades the artist’s critical message and further oppresses citizens by locking them even more into the position of passive consumers, alienated by what was supposed to be the aura of a work of art. The culture industry inadvertently invites companies to reappropriate artists’ symbols, because capitalism demands the pursuit of profit and these works grant them culturally sanctioned marketing.

Our struggle used against us

Adorno concedes that art can remain a form of activism by exposing systemic contradictions through its symbols. After 2008, Alec Monopoly reuses the Monopoly Man—an emblem of enrichment—to claim a critique of capitalism.

Yet market reception reshapes the message: highly priced works, collected by the wealthy, confirm the very logic they claim to contest. The tension between artistic autonomy and the market leaves little structural room for sustained dissent.

Any serious artist must recognize the importance of their audience. If your art is meant to be anti‑capitalist, your audience should therefore be composed of people oppressed by this economic system—in other words, the working class. Alec’s works, by contrast, are often sold for tens of thousands of dollars to some of the richest people in the world, such as the Kardashians, Snoop Dogg, and various other celebrities. No member of the class oppressed by capitalism can afford to indulge in such expensive art. Consequently, Alec Monopoly lives in a Californian mansion and displays his many gold chains and watches.

The Monopoly Man has the potential to become a symbol that exposes the contradictions of capitalism in Adorno’s sense. Alec, however, merely pretends to fight the system while benefiting from manipulating his audience into believing he is on their side.

While Adorno affirms that art can still be a powerful form of activism, Alec Monopoly perfectly illustrates the challenges that the culture industry imposes on artists. Creating a work of art for the working class would never be profitable, and the culture industry demands that we pursue profit. Ultimately, there is little structural space for dissent in the art world.

Further analysis and conclusion

Commercial goods and cultural goods can be called “products” in the literature, since they are designed to be brought to market and sold (Nyahoho 2001). This raises the question of whether art and commerce can be considered compatible disciplines. Indeed, art is linked to freedom of creativity, individuality, and irrational creative chaos, whereas economics is about efficiency, productivity, and rational financial optimization. The authors believed in the power of negativity in art. They thought that authentic art should express the suffering and negativity of the world in order to open the way to a possible utopian transformation of society.

Figure 6 - Painting by Alec Monopoly — 1986 (Artlife 2023)

The work above illustrates the problem of capitalist art identified by the authors, as it reproduces existing symbols of capitalism and celebrates luxury muses and pop‑culture icons. Citizens of the Instagram world through their “likes,” like gallery visitors through their purchases, have helped elevate Alec as one of the flagship figures of street art. Thinkers of the Frankfurt School share a common concern for how capitalism affects the autonomy of art and the potential of art to serve as a critical and emancipatory force in society. Their critique of the culture industry underscores the risk that art will be reduced to an instrument of social domination; here, a portion of the people submit themselves to their own executioner by choosing Alec.

Capitalist symbols have become our new compasses, and it is easier to embrace their sweet, well‑packaged values than to try to open them up, dissect them, and reflect on them. Thus, we globally understand what the Catholic cross means just as we do the “M” of McDonald’s. We tend to like symbols that remind us of our youth and adolescence, and this is why Alec is popular in painting today and not at the peak of Monopoly’s popularity. The children who played this game 20 or 30 years ago can now buy paintings and may adore Mr. Monopoly out of nostalgia.

The subject has “learned predispositions to respond in a consistently favorable or unfavorable way toward the object” (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975). This is what is called attitude. Attitudes are psychological processes observed through the subject’s reactions. Attitudes are formed according to cognitive faculties (beliefs), affective faculties (initial state and associations within the memory network), and conative faculties (the subject’s intentions regarding the object) (Fointiat and Barbier 2015). This is why our tastes depend greatly on our generation and shared past experiences. The idea in critical theory or in the reappropriation of symbolism is not to reject every norm, but to create a more personal meaning by taking a critical stance and composing a story that resembles oneself.

Figure 7 - The artist Gary, selling his works itinerantly for 15 years throughout Montreal. (2024)

This work is a reprise of a mural commission that the artist Gary completed for a fan of Alec Monopoly. He told me he knew this symbol would appeal and that he could sell it. Like any professional artist, Gary is concerned about the legitimacy of “copying” Alec’s work. He also told me he felt comfortable doing so because the creator of the character from the famous board game intended to criticize the rent system of American property owners, and Alec’s recent appropriation goes in a political direction contrary to the author’s intentions.

Apparently, Gary, as a street artist, is quite critical of the capitalist world represented by the Mr. Monopoly symbol. Here we see the absence of pop colors and luxury brands, and instead a balance between the symbol of the heart and that of money—with money replacing the heart’s place. The work is made on a piece of recycled wood, and the sidewalk‑selling context in front of Montreal’s Place‑d’Armes metro prompts a more critical reflection on the Mr. Monopoly symbol. From my experience as a gallerist and from conversations I have had with Gary, Alec is more likely to find success among wealthy collectors, and his works will therefore be taken up by art galleries, whereas Gary will sell his works for ten times less on the street. This distinction does not exist for lack of will on the artist’s part—Gary would like to see his works in galleries and make a better living from his art. What Adorno denounces is that art, when made by a professional, risks losing this autonomy by becoming a commodity that must please and be sold. Returning to the example of Alec Monopoly—a rich and popular artist—the social dimension lies in the expression of ostentatious economic success for the wealthy owner rather than in genuine reflection on a social issue. This state of passivity is the condition into which our consumer habits lock us, at the expense of our potential as producers of culture.

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