Folk art was a separate institution, created by and for the people. Whereas businessmen's only interest in the cultural field is to produce profit and even to maintain their class rule and fabricate Mass culture. .
It is accepted that mass culture began as, and to some extent still is, a cancerous growth on high culture. Fully matured cultural tradition can be seen as extracting the cultures riches and putting nothing back. Constantly evolving mass/pop culture reduces so far away from high culture as to appear quite disconnected from it. Mass/Pop culture is imposed from above, as Karl Marx recognized, onto the passive susceptibility of the ignorant masses, to which decisions lie between consumption or no consumption. It is there that are the sole beneficiaries of mass culture integrates the masses in a form of debased high culture. This lack of control proves the power of the mass culture businessman, shown when during the 1929 depression, when capitalism was in chaos. Focus was turned from the "idols of production" to the "idols of consumption" such as Hollywood movie stars, creating a "dream-like-world", a marketing heaven, for the masses to aspire to. Mass culture can therefore never be worthwhile.
Commodities are imposed upon the masses, taking away freedom of choice and individuality. Instead of being related to one another as members of a community, the relation is formed with a system of industrial production, something abstract and untouchable. The great culture-bearing elites have communities with members having an individual role and sharing similar interests. In contrast, mass society sinks to the lowest level, to that of its most primitive members, its taste complies with that of the least sensitive and most ignorant member. Members accept any idiocy if it is wholly agreed as knowledge in the capitalist superstructure. .
Homogenized mass culture is so rigidly democratic, refusing distinction or discrimination that it succeeds in destroying all values and dissolving any form of barriers.
