Mass Culture

Mass culture refers to how culture gets produced, whereas popular culture refers to how culture gets consumed. Mass culture is culture which is mass produced, distributed, and marketed.
“Mass Culture” is a set of cultural values and ideas that arise from common exposure of a population to the same cultural activities, communications media, music and art, etc.
Mass culture becomes possible only with modern communications and electronic media.
A mass culture is transmitted to individuals, rather than arising from people’s daily interactions, and therefore lacks the distinctive content of cultures rooted in community and region.
Mass culture tends to reproduce the liberal value of individualism and to foster a view of the citizen as consumer.
Adorno’s extended conception of ‘culture industry’ renders the usual criticism of his views as ‘elitist’ meaningless. Adorno was among the radical critics of mass culture. Adorno developed a critical methodology to analyze the production, texts, and reception of the artifacts of what became known as “popular culture,” thus anticipating the approach of later forms of “cultural studies.” Along with Max Horkheimer, Adorno developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) the first critical theory which discerned the crucial roles of mass culture and communication in contemporary capitalist societies. 

Adorno and his colleagues, emigrants from Nazi Germany, observed the use of mass culture in German fascism and were shocked to see in the United States the same sort of ideological culture which reproduced the existing social relations and served as propaganda for the established socio-economic and political order.

From Sociology Index

Adorno Aesthetics

In the difficult and aphoristic work Aesthetic Theory Adorno started from his theorem that there is no philosophical first principle. “A general theory of the aesthetically concrete would necessarily let slip what interested it in object in the first place.” The concept of art refuses definition if one doesn’t accept alternatives between trivial universality and arbitrary judgments. From this point of view Adorno rejects the archaic definition of aesthetics as the theory of the beautiful: the concept of beauty is inadequate to the full content of the aesthetic. Following Hegelian idea of art as a product of history, Adorno sees modern art scarcely possible unless it does experiment. More than being up to date modern art tends to oppose the ruling Zeitgeist - arts seeks refuge in its own negation, and nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore. “The cheap aestheticism of short-winded politics is reciprocal with the faltering of aesthetic power. Recommending jazz and rock-and-roll instead of Beethoven does not demolish the affirmative lie of culture but rather furnishes barbarism and the profit interest of the culture industry with subterfuge. The allegedly vital and uncorrupted nature of such products is synthetically processed but precisely those powers that are supposedly the target of the Great Refusal: These products are the truly corrupt.”

From Kirjasto