Theodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt S
chool, the influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s
, including such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has pr
oved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthe
tic Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a lifetime'
s investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful, Adorno shows
how such concepts frame and distil human experience and that it is human experi
ence that ultimately underlies aesthetics. In Adorno's formulation 'art is the s
edimented history of human misery'.
