Underground v.s. mainstream cultural production

“According to Karl Marx, art is part of the superstructure and is inescapably determined by the mode of production or the economic system. Capitalism produces commodities, each one of which is a “fetish”, or an object with abstract value. Fetishism is the projection of human nature and of human desires projected upon an external object. If one accepts the proposition that all art is commodified, (and art must be a commodity in a capitalist society), then certain consequences logically follow. All artists are cultural producers, laboring in a capitalist system for the benefits of the market. All art made within this system is a commodity to be bought and sold as objects of desire upon which human feelings are projected. The work of art in a capitalist society must be a consumer object and therefore must also be an object of desire, a fetish”(Willete, 2011, para. 2). Art as an ideology, popularizing a certain kind of culture, is therefore necessarily connected to the current system and, in the next logic step, under the control of the ruling classes. Now, when dialectical thinking framework is applied, there is natural tendency for a counter force, a contradicting movement to be born out of the thesis itself. Hence, the mutual existence of mainstream and underground is commenced.