Only art closer to the masses can win them, not avant-garde forms.

Evidence

At no point in time, no matter how utopian, will it be possible to win the masses for a higher form of art. It will only be possible to win them for one which is closer to them. And the difficulty consists precisely in creating this form of art in such a way that it would be possible, with a clear conscience, to assert that it was a higher form of art. This can succeed with almost nothing of what the bourgeois avant-garde propagates … What is true of growing, living forms, by contrast, is that there is something in them which is warming, useful and ultimately cheering. Dialectically, they take up `kitsch’, thus bringing themselves nearer to the masses, and then nevertheless overcome it. It may only be film which is equal to this task today; at least, it is a task which lies close at hand for it. This insight caused Benjamin to stop looking for the solution where it could not conceivably be found, namely in autonomous art. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 232

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Benjamin’s constructive program — dialectically absorbing kitsch to raise it — is a whole position on mass art that resists summarising and reframes the entire Benjamin-Adorno axis.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s earlier Benjamin-on-aura and technical-reproducibility material; also connects to the Passagen-Werk notes mentioned in the same paragraph.