ABSTRACT
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Adorno’s discussions of the culture industry began with his disagreements with Benjamin over the latter’s belief in the transformative potential of film and radio to radicalize the masses. The illusory pleasures offered by the culture industry only serve the ends of profit and the further exploitation of the masses, Adorno argues. Adorno’s argument is grounded in a complex understanding of the autonomy of art that runs throughout his works. The attempt to synthesize these ideas on commodity fetishism, the culture industry, and the autonomy of art into a general theory of aesthetics is to be found in Adorno’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. The assertion that art is autonomous and must resist the incursions of mass- produced culture put forth by Adorno played a crucial role in Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory of modernist painting.
