I Adornos musik analyserar Sven-Olov Wallenstein de centrala texterna i Adornos musikfilosofiska författarskap, deras motsättningar och inre spänningar, och visar att de är lika sammansatta och öppna som den tradition till vilken han alltid bekände sig.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s analysis of the cultural industry in ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1947) paints a somewhat negative picture, which must be seen in the immediate context of the Second World War. Other texts by Adorno, from his earlier debate with Walter Benjamin to his last work, the unfinished Aesthetic Theory (1970/1997), provide a more complex understanding. Mass culture and the autonomous art referred to in Adorno’s works are both conditioned by the contradictory social totality; they have a dialectical relation, and elements of truth and falsity are intertwined in both. Similarly, the critique of commodity fetishism is not an unmixed argument: while reification threatens to reduce artworks to mere consumer items, this is also what allows artworks to harbour a capacity for resistance. No art can escape fetishism, while not all ways of dealing with art are equal.