Is Adorno's view on mass culture still relevent?

I'm not sure if his views were ever relevant. On an unrelated note, his insistence on labeling all of pop culture (music in particular) pretty much totally aesthetically invalid is frustrating. His points regarding "serious" vs. "popular" music piss me right the fuck off every time I read them. Anyone who actually knows what they're talking about, please feel free to correct me on any of this; it's just how I read it.

I now you already saw this thread, Jessica, but I don't want to repeat myself.

He is best on music that he knows a LOT ABOUT eg "classical" music 1890-1960-ish. He is an easily trivialised writer, pro and con. MINIMA MORALIA is a masterpiece. In his youth, he had been much more generous towards and excited about pop culture: he saw it exploited and hijacked by the nazis and turned bitterly what he considered his own naivety. In later life, he became more ambivalent again, especially in regard to cinema.

If nothing else surely his thoughts are still relevant because so many people are wielding them (or watered-down versions reminiscent of them) against this or that part of culture.

Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise, Chapter Six.

I think Adorno's thoughts on mass culture can only really be understood in the context of his metaphysics as a whole -- in particular his response to Hegel. He comments somewhere that he and Horkheimer did not use the phrase 'mass culture' but 'culture industry' deliberately. ie 'mass culture' cannot simply be opposed to 'elite culture' or 'artistic culture'. Elsewhere it seems fairly clear (in later writings) that Adorno considers himself part of the 'culture industry': i.e. culture is not a distinct sphere of commodity exchange or of social life, but something like a transposed version of Hegelian 'geist'. In other words, perhaps 'culture' might be read as the threatened becoming-total of social life, so the culture industry must include eg. education, politics as well as all realms of cultural production. To me it is the philosophical (rather than historical or sociological) basis of Adorno's work on culture that makes it interesting and relevant, even where individual judgements may seem mistaken today. Few of his interpreters begin from the same level of theoretical and methodological sophistication (which often belies his rather violent approach to individual cultural products) leading to crude evaluations of his work's 'revolutionary' (or otherwise) potential. Avoid: Jameson on Adorno. But I was re-reading Simon Jarvis's book on _Adorno_ recently [Polity Press] and it's fairly reliable.

Jarvis is a terrible pretentious bore. Avoidez.