American Legacy Foundation

There is an inherent irony here, in that the restrictive understanding of the modernist legacy that prevailed for many decades is, in part, the product of a certain kind of exile experience. With works like The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) and The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949), the Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno laid the foundation for later accounts of an unbridgeable rift between modernist art and the popular culture industry. Their pessimistic outlook was undoubtedly reinforced by their distance from American society their failure to understand how cultural formations that to them seemed crudely reductive 48... 

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