Did Aristotle ever check out his theory of tragedy against a cross-section of the audience at Delphi?

How other people feel and think is, I have suggested, not precisely knowable. But most of us can describe our reactions to some degree, and an asthonishing fact about the history of art-criticism – including literary criticism – is that it has shown virtually no interest in this source of knowledge. It is standard practice for critics to assert how ‘we’ feel in response to this or that artwork, when all they mean is how they feel. Did Aristotle ever check out his theory of tragedy against a cross-section of the audience at Delphi? Apparently not; and criticism has remained resolutely blinkered ever since. The critics of mass art that Carroll dissects invariably base their pronouncements on whatever fanciful image of the masses they happen to favour. Consequently their critiques are essentially a branch of imaginative fiction.
This is particularly apparent when they are driven by political ideals. The Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, for instance, believed that mass art is a capitalist conspiracy designed to keep the masses in subjection by preventing them from developing independent critical intelligence. To this end, he maintains, mass art ‘automatizes and stupefies’ their mental faculties, and prevents them from questioning the existing social order. [Noel] Carroll [in his book A Philosophy of Mass Art] has no difficulty showing that, in fact, many of the stories and stereotypes of mass art (science fiction, for example, and westerns) are about the possibility of social change. But such evidence would make little impression on Adorno, since his convictions about how mass art works bear no relation to any ascertainable facts. He asserts, for example, that film is such a rapid medium that it ‘leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience’. They cannot deviate from the precise details on the screen without losing the thread of the story. ‘Sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.’ Consequently film, as a medium, ‘forces its victims to equate it directly with reality’.
Film-goers will receive this news with surprise. Walter Benjamin another critic who draws his evidence exclusively from his imagination, reaches conclusions about film almost diametrically opposed to Adorno’s. He welcomes the advent of film and photography, since they make possible mass-produced art, and replace the semi-religious ‘aura’ of old-style-art-works, which instilled respect for tradition. Films, Benjamin believes, encourage, critical detachment in their audience. Their use of close-ups allows a penetrative scrutiny of the realities of capitalist society. It ‘extends our comprehension of the necessities that rule our lives’, and is ideally suited to develop working-class consciousness and contribute to the proletarian revolution. Further, film does not hold the spectator in thrall as ‘auratic’ art does, but allows divided, intermittent attention. The result is a quite new way of seeing, ‘symptomatic of profound changes in apperception’, that will galvanize concerted criticism in the mass audience.
Evidence that watching film enhances an audience’s cognitive and perceptual powers in the way he claims is entirely lacking from Benjamin’s account, and that is typical of the kind of ‘theoretical’ criticism he is writing.

Is 'high' art superior? [fragment]
uit: What good are the arts? - John Carey