A indústria cultural brasileira na formulação de Renato Ortiz

Abstract

The article focuses on Renato Ortiz’s interpretation of the culture industry in Brazil. The hypothesis proposed by him became a reference for other authors and a part of a common consolidated knowledge, which does not always recognize its origin in the work of Ortiz. According to him, culture industry only matured in Brazilian society in the 1960s and 1970s, under military rule, when the market for cultural goods reached a high level in volume and size, with the expressive development of the television, music, film and publishing industry, and others, as well as advertising agencies and all kinds of mass media businesses, increasingly managed according to international standards of business rationality, with direct or indirect support from the State. For the author, the maturing of the culture industry generated a “modern Brazilian tradition”, which ideologically incorporated the national and popular utopian formulations to build an “international popular” that would sell Brazilian cultural products also for the foreign market. The “popular” would now be understood as what is more widely accepted by the general public, and the “national” conceived as a space of domestic consumption and an attribute for the worldwide sale of Brazilian cultural products, such as soap operas.

Keywords

• brazilian culture
• culture industry
• modernity