Page 35 - summer 22

never have artistic merit. He also dismisses jazz, criticising its use of an occasional

discordant note as if trying to fool the listener by sounding superficially like the
calculated dissonance in a “serious” avant-garde composition. This is part of Adorno’s
dismissal of all popular culture. Only serious, high culture – Modernist art, theatre,
serious avant-garde music, Modernist literary novels and poetry - can engage,
challenge and extend the minds and tastes of those who embrace it, whereas “every
visit to the cinema, leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider or worse.”

Modern film theorist Robert Stam (Film Theory. 2000) takes issue with this extreme

stance, and makes an important general point: “What Adorno missed was the fact
that popular art, for example jazz, might also be difficult, discontinuous, complex,
challenging.” Walter Benjamin, a more marginally attached member of the Frankfurt
School, also disagreed with Adorno about popular culture.

Walter Benjamin 1892-1940; photography and the “aura” of art

Benjamin was one of the first critics to seriously reflect on the cultural impact of

photography and film, in a celebrated essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). The nature of photography had long been
debated; was it an art or a science? Would it make paintings redundant? Benjamin
said that photography did undermine the “aura” of tradition and uniqueness
possessed by a single, unique work of art, but on the other hand its capacity to mass-