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