文化工业是德国法兰克福学派的学者马克斯·霍克海默及狄奥多·阿多诺等人提出的概念，用以批判资本主义社会下大众文化的商品化及标准化。它首次出现于霍克海默与阿多诺合著的《启蒙辩证法》（1944年）中的重要章节《文化工业：作为大众欺骗的启蒙》。在这个章节中作者分析了后资本主义时代文化的生产和功能的转变。阿多诺称文化工业是从上向下“有意识地结合其消费者”。这部著作标志着批判理论早期的结束。

“文化工业”是一个复杂且非静态的概念，无法清晰定义。它代替了作者原本使用的“大众文化”（Massenkultur）的概念。该章节核心部分指出：所有的文化都将变为商品；艺术将根据经济价值，而非艺术价值定义。在市民社会中分析自主性的艺术品不再重要。因此，美学自身将预定宣传内容，成为商品的功能之一，

The term culture industry (German:Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse. (See Eros and Civilization, 1955).