looking forward

Rob Walker has a thoughtful post about the new Girl Talk album on his blog. He argues that the success or failure of their pay-what-you-like distribution will be more telling than Radiohead's nearly identical experiment because Girl Talk didn't become famous through traditional music business models. One would assume that much of the rest of the commentary floating around about the album is roughly similar, perhaps with some tweaks of emphasis.

Everyone is late to the party, however. Theodor Adorno already has it covered:

"The work of art becomes its own material and forms the technique of reproduction and presentation, actually a technique for the distribution of a real object."

And later:

"With the liquidation of its opposition to empirical reality art assumes a parasitic character. Inasmuch as it now appears itself as reality, which is supposed to stand in for the reality out there, it tends to relate back to culture as its own object."