It is hardly surprising that, especially in the United States, where the arts were expected to conform to democratic tastes, the demanding high Modernism of Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy has never received so warm a reception. Greater prestige was conferred on his one-time colleague Walter Benjamin, who, unlike Adorno, embraced the “dissolution of the aura” of the individual artwork that promised, via “mechanical reproduction,” to make high culture newly accessible to the masses. – New York Review of Books