Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born in 1903 to relatively affluent parents in central Germany. His mother was a gifted singer, of Italian descent, and his father was a wine merchant and Jewish. Adorno's partial Jewish status was to have an immeasurable effect upon his life and philosophical works. He was an academically and musically gifted child. Initially, it appeared that Adorno was destined for a musical career. During the early to mid 1920s Adorno studied music composition under Alban Berg in Vienna and his talent was recognized by the likes of Berg and Schoenberg. However, in the late 1920's, Adorno joined the faculty of the University of Frankfurt and devoted the greatest part of his considerable talent and energy to the study and teaching of philosophy.

Adorno's Jewish heritage forced him to eventually seek exile from Nazi Germany, initially registering as a doctoral student at Merton College, Oxford and then, as a member of the University of Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research, in New York concluding his exile in Southern California. Adorno did not complete his Oxford doctorate and appeared to be persistently unhappy in his exilic condition. Along with other members of the Institute for Social Research, Adorno returned to the University of Frankfurt immediately after the completion of the war, taking up a professorial chair in philosophy and sociology. Adorno remained a professor at the University of Frankfurt until his death in 1969.

Among the foremost members of the Frankfurt School (post-marxist school of german social and critical philosophers), Theodor Adorno launched a tirade against the modern world. With an arsenal of unsupported assertions strung together without obvious connecting elements, Adorno set out to critique what he called the "phantasmagoria" of commodity consumption. A commodity, according to Adorno, is a deception: it conceals its mode of production behind an attractive veneer, becomes "reified" as an object without a history. Adorno deemed it his philosophical task to get beneath these surfaces - to discover material processes that would betray the seductive world of objects. The task, though philosophical in nature, was essentially a crusade for freedom: Adorno wanted to liberate the intellect from the model of commodity consumption.

Freedom would be possible only insofar as humanity could align its consciousness with material processes: forces that could not be simply identified and consumed, but had to be reckoned with in the mode of what they were not. According to Adorno, this was achievable by means of "negative dialectics," or thought through negations and displacements, as opposed to identifications and affirmations.

Adorno repeatedly turned to avant-garde art for support. The mental effort required to enjoy avant-garde art disrupted the mindless consumption that Adorno thought dominated society.