"The more people perceive themselves as a mass, however, the sooner the masses will also develop productive powers in the spiritual and cultural domain that are worth financing. The masses are no longer left to their own devices; rather, they prevail in their very abandonment. Refusing to be thrown scraps, they demand instead to be served at laid-out tables. There is little room left for the so-called educated classes, who must either join the repast or maintain their snobbish aloofness. Their provincial isolation is, in any case, at an end. They are being absorbed by the masses, a process that creates the homogeneous cosmopolitan audience in which everyone has the same responses, from the bank director to the sales clerk, from the diva to the stenographer. Self-pitying complaints about this turn toward mass taste are belated; the cultural heritage that the masses refuse to accept has become to some extent merely a historical property, since the economic and social reality to which it corresponded has changed."
Siegfried Kracauer, "Cult of Distraction", Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 325.
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