Mass culture creates a herd mentality, banishing independent and autonomous thought
It destroys our self-confidence. It marginalizes and discredits nonconformists. It depoliticizes the citizenry. It instills a sense of collective futility and impotence by presenting the ruling ideology as a revealed, unassailable truth, an inevitable and inexorable force that alone makes human progress possible.
Mass culture is an assault that, as Gramsci wrote, results in a “confused and fragmentary” consciousness or what Marx called “false consciousness.” It is designed to impart the belief to the proletariat that its “true” interests are aligned with those of the ruling class, in our case global corporatism.
Chris Hedges

Everything we do, see and hear is the result of perception management
“Our lives, everything we do, everything we see and hear, and everything we as ‘individuals’ do, is the result of a worldwide, long-entrenched perception management program. Anyone who fails to see it is deluded, and allowing themselves to be deluded.” New York Times comment

Modern culture operates by stimuli such as sex and greed
“Contemporary life in industrial societies operates almost entirely with such simple stimuli. What is stimulated are such drives as sexual desire, greed, sadism, destructiveness, narcissism; these stimuli are mediated through movies, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the commodity market.” Erich Fromm


POSSIBILITIES

The artist must never cease warring with society, to make it more human
“Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
“The conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
James Baldwin

Beauty which is acquired at the cost of justice is an abomination.

“The criterion by which we judge beauty is integrity, the criterion by which we judge integrity is truth, and truth is the correspondence of the finite to the infinite, the specific to the general, the cosmos to God. Beauty which is acquired at the cost of justice is an abomination and should be rejected for its loathsomeness.” Abraham Heschel

“In most of our lives there is a lack of sensitivity to beauty. You may see a beautiful face, a lovely painting, a marvelous temple and the sculptured hills, but never feel intensely or passionately the beauty of the earth and the sky. One wonders why.” J. Krishnamurti