In our age, new technologies have made cultural products accessible to the multitude of people as never before. Mechanical reproduction permitted art to leave the museum, and music to leave the concert hall. Printing, photography, and audio recording made the objects of culture available to ordinary individuals. Yet despite this apparent democratization, culture remains a sign of privilege. We have mass culture for the masses, and high culture for the cultured.
Mass culture pushes quantity, while high culture extols quality.
For both, the use of the cultural object as a sign of individual identity and status precedes its capacity to inform. The division of culture and the contradiction between culture as commodity and culture as communication is determined not by any differences in the intelligence or creative capacity of persons, but by the ownership of the technologies of production and distribution. Electronic reproduction and networked communications now promise to push the contradictions of culture and society to new extremes. Digital electronic media don't merely reproduce, they clone. Every digital artwork is an original.