Woodstock as Commodity Fetish
No pretension about social change, art and culture.A certain cynicism for Liberalism. In a way its refreshing to see the detachment from the zeitgeist of the moment, the ”noise” that distracts. Artie Kornfeld was essentially a street-wise Brooklyn boy from lower-middle class origins who didn’t need an Ivy League diploma to understand the mechanics of popular culture as an ambiguous commodity that was to be consumed and mass marketed.
Time Magazine, July 7, 1967
Like our financial markets,popular music was subject to ” irrational exhuberance” and the value of the music, the art, could have no direct bearing on the number of units sold. The shelf life of the commodity was also subject to short expiry cycles such as Hit Parades. The Woodstock generation was the the coming of age: a huge market demographic entering the sweet spot of their period of mass consumption. They were the first substantial social group to enjoy the luxury of leisure which affirmed their status as middle class. They were also a radical and predictable break from the ethics and values characterized by the Great Depression. For better and worse.
The video of Kornfeld, co-creator of the original Woodstock with Michael Lang, shows an individual who stayed outside of the leftist political narrative and refused to be seduced by the romanticism and idealism of the times. He intuitively saw what Theodor Adorno termed ”the culture industries” and their ability to homogenize tastes and crowd out legitimate art. Also, Kornfeld does not appear to have been permutated and transformed by a desire for social change and flower power. The pacifism of Woodstock and its jingo and argot is analogous to the shop talk of Wall Street and the ecstatic rapture of Woodstock audiences equivalent to the stock market trading floor or the metaphysics and miracles of old time religion.
Within the framework of Guy Debord’s ”Society of the Spectacle” we can see in the Woodstock generation the fruition of the commodity completing its colonization of social life. What Debord would refer to as ”commodity fetishism” would result in social life being replaced by its representation. The implication being that Woodstock and its dissemination in mass media through popular culture would condition the behavior and lives of millions as this event became elevated and exalted as a symbol of popular consciousness.
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