Current consensus of this seminal group. Although I find their progeny tiresome, the likes of Benjamin and Adorno strike me as deeply relevant. Thoughts? Plz don't just write 'bro, they jews' or variations thereupon.
haven't read them as seriously as i should have, but i haven't read anything from them i've necessarily disliked. i've read art in the age of mechanical reproduction and the culture industry from those two respectively and specifically, but it's been a long time admittedly. benjamin seems very relevant and interesting, i've been meaning to get around to his essays on radio.
Frankfurt school really solidified the role of philosophy as a hobby -- something to be read for pleasure or to give off a certain mysterious intellectual vibe, not something to be taken too seriously. Critical analysis of art, culture, and politics are the cocomelon of well-educated petty-elite normies. Walter Benjamin especially did a great job of blending these concepts up into a slurry that just about anyone can slonk down without much effort. "Nowadays art is... fascist". What reasonable person could ever disagree? Prophetic. Let's lick his balls for 100 years
Just a heads-up: Martin Jay's book "The Dialectical Imagination" has been the go-to primer for these guys.
Adorno is cash. I swing between finding his writing hogwash, myopic and provincial to revelatory, still-and-increasingly-relevant insight when I read him, which is always a good sign, for me personally at least.