Adorno read jazz as the subject ridiculing itself, then generalized to all art

Evidence

In his 1936 essay On Jazz' in the ZfS, Adorno, inspired by the concept of the sado-masochistic character, had attempted to present the core of the phenomenon of jazz as the subject's smiling ridicule of itself. This interpretation was now generalized into an interpretation of the culture industry as including both low’ and `high’ art. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the culture industry proved to be a symptom of a premature climax in the world-historical process in which the subject, fixated on sovereignty over nature, was still putting a good face on the mockery it had made of itself. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1416

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Adorno read jazz syncopation as illusory individual breakout masking collective subjection — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 879