ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on certain ideas formulated by Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. Marcuse opposed the diffusion of bourgeois art among the masses because this would merely confirm the social order that such art affirms. Commenting on the division between high and low culture, serious and light art, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote: Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. Adorno was sceptical about the oppositional value of committed or partisan art. In his view advanced works of art - for example, the music of Arnold Schonberg - served a critical, negative function by virtue of their autonomy from everyday reality, their functionlessness and their uncompromising aesthetic form. As far as contemporary artists engaged in cultural struggle are concerned, the Frankfurt School's writings on art and mass culture are valuable in terms of deepening theoretical understanding, but they are less useful in terms of actual practice.
