Product Description

This book is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture - Adorno's finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55489 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From the Back Cover
The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by his many detractors. In today's world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno's work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.

Customer Reviews

Indispensable but flawed
Adorno's essays develop his theory that "mass culture" - he speaks particularly of modern popular music - has degenerated so that one can only see it today as a commodity. There is, for him, no question of art in this music ; rather the masses' tastes are produced by the industry which sells the music.

Adorno is one of the few writers who have developed in detail the very widespread idea in academic circles that popular music is bereft of any human or artistic value. The whole field of study of popular music has in a way been erected by reaction againt the analyses of Adorno. From this point of view it is important to look at what he wrote.

Nevertheless his analysis is tremendously problematic. If what he says is true, different changes in popular music ( the arrival of rock, punk, rap, blues or techno) reflect nothing more than the introduction of gadgets to sell more records, and in no way reflect social or artistic developments; in this way pop music is seen to be outside history.

Adorno claims a background in marxism, which makes it perhaps all the more surprising that he does not see popular music as a contradictory phenomenon containing voices and values from different social classes, in conflict within the genre. But his marxism was that which had more or less written off the mass of workers as agents of social change. It is then perhaps unsurprisings that for him, as well as not being able to change the world, ordinary workers listen to music, and write music, which is of no value.