>Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"? Yes, he makes several clear arguments.

>Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"? Yes, he makes several clear arguments. Is there argument to your comment aside from the ad-hominem and the tired ageism / "old folks hate young people" cliche? Of course there's also a context to his critique, which is not any naive "young vs old", or "change is bad/good" (he cites Alban Berg and was all for avant guarde developments, hardly someone against "change"), but related to a high culture with centuries of development. It's like people talking about French cuisine, and someone comes in chiming how McDonalds is great and young people like it. Not the same cultural context. Of course the latter cultural context also doesn't believe there is any hierarchy of cultural contexts and practices besides "personal taste", so any discussion of particular practices and their merits or lack thereof is moot within it. >It's a remarkably small-c conservative screed Only for those conflating mass market populism, mass culture, and relativism as some kind of liberating concept. He (and many others of the left and even some of the right) have written thousands of pages against that idea.