Aesthetic truth was bound to the expression of the untruth of bourgeois society. Art really only exists as long as it is impossible by virtue of the order which it transcends. That is why the existence of all the great forms of art is paradoxical, and more than all the others that of the novel, the bourgeois art form par excellence which the film has now appropriated for itself. Today with the most extreme increase of real tension the possibility of the work of art itself has become utterly questionable. Monopoly is the executor: eliminating tension, it abolishes art along with conflict. Only in this consummated conflictlessness does art wholly become one moment of material production and thus turn completely into the lie to which it has always contributed its part in the past. Yet at the same time it here approaches more closely to the truth than those remnants of traditional art that still continue to flourish, to the extent that all preservation of individual conflict in the work of art, and generally even the introduction of social conflict as well, only serves as a romantic deception. It transfigures the world into one in which conflict is still possible rather than revealing it as one in which the omnipotent power of production is beginning ever more obviously to repress such a possibility. It is a delicate question whether the liquidation of aesthetic intrication and development represents the liquidation of every last trace of resistance or rather the medium of it’s secret omnipresence.

“One doesn’t do that sort of thing,” says the smart court official Brack when Hedda Gabler shoots herself. The monopoly now assumes his position.

Theodor Adorno: The Schema of Mass Culture