Adorno's interest in the work of art is in its potential to express truth in an age in which the dialectic of Enlightenment appears to be tending towards an increased barbarism. Art as a cognitive faculty for thought freed from domination depends upon its autonomy, that is, its distinction from the commodified realm of mass culture and its "mass deception." To quote Adorno, "the division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute" (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944, 135).

The divide thus corresponds to the fact of the division of labour in capitalist society.[6] Accordingly, until that division is abolished high art and mass culture are unable to be reconciled--they are "two halves of an integral freedom that do not add up" (Adorno 1936, 53). The appearance of their reconciliation in the postmodern artefact therefore must be a false one, symptomatic of its subsumption by the culture industry.

The critical capacity of art exists only when "it has become autonomous". Adorno posits the possibility of a resistant space on the incompleteness of the domination exercised by capital and the market. He locates a lag within this subsumption in Europe, such that the educational system and various artistic and cultural practices were permitted some degree of autonomy