> In other words, he has some good things to say about the taste of the
> elite and nothing but loathing for the taste of everyone else. Can you
> think of a counter-example?
Adorno would ask, who exactly *is* this "everyone else", whose tastes we've all seemingly been preprogrammed to know and approve of in advance? Isn't that just the slightest bit suspicious? I could reel off a list of the nice things Adorno says about mass culture, ranging from the early Disney cartoons to the wisdom of folk tales in Minima Moralia, to the informal music of the early Sixties, to the musical analysis of Alban Berg (whose work is soaked in populism). Problem is, this wouldn't get us anywhere -- thinking doesn't think by examples. You're asking for an Adorno who is really a Fredric Jameson, someone who's already on our side of the great cultural watershed of WW II, and whose assumptions and cultural habitus is already that of our own. But mass-culture in Adorno's day, all the way until the Sixties, really, was a dreadfully oppressive, racist, mind-bendingly patriarchal and stupefying affair; what we see nowadays -- the occasional black and white film, for example -- is just the high-quality stuff which survived. The counter-culture was the prison-break from this particular form of mass-culture, but Adorno died before he had a chance to reflect seriously on this.
-- Dennis