The consumer becomes the ideology of the amusement industry, whose institutions he or she cannot escape.* One has to have seen Mrs. Miniver,* just as one must subscribe to Life and Time. Everything is perceived only from the point of view that it can serve as something else, however vaguely that other thing might be envisaged. Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation which they mistake for the merit of works of art—becomes its only use
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