Adorno's Aesthetic Theory

I don't yet have a sense of the whole with Adorno, so here it goes.

After art was supposedly "freed" from "cultic function," it lost its place in the world; thus, progression becomes regression. Although art has taken the place of religion, it must turn against this role to become something "other." Adorno counters other theorists like Kant and the Freudians, for removing the body from the aesthetic experience (Kant) or substituting art for bodily experience (Freud) (10). To Adorno and Marcuse, pleasure can be radical (14).
In addition, Adorno states that the "ugly" has its place in art. This idea of "ugliness" stems from recognizing and rejecting what was once feared. When rejected, we deem it ugly. He also links the ugly to the beautiful in terms of symmetry, writing that we understand symmetry better through its contrast with asymmetry. Here, he suggests some Hegelian opposition. Adorno traces the place of the "ugly" in art, from the ancient Greeks to anti-feudal paintings of the nineteenth century (48). He states that the bourgeois rejection of industrial landcapes as unaesthetic stems from nature's domination over man rather than the opposite. Aesthetics, Adorno claims, must be about more than beauty, for art needs tension. Ancient cultures recognized this and represented this tension in art and myth. Only in the Enlightenment was art associated with a more formal beauty. However, he also notes that ancient cultures didn't recognize the individual in art (Greeks sculptures vs. modern ones). Overall, Adorno stresses the importance of the aesthetic experience. To lose the aesthetic, even a sentimental one, makes art "barbaric" (61).

Like Marcuse, Adorno links aesthetics with radical thought (through individual, subjective experience).
Like the French concept of jolie-laide, beauty in ugliness.
This reminds me of the birth of Aphrodite. In one version, Aphrodite rises out of the sea after Uranus's severed organs are thrown into the sea. Love and beauty stems from violence (and sexuality).

I don't have a sense of how this all hangs together.
How does Benjamin's theory fail? (56)