Sentence:  For Theodor Adorno and his colleagues at the Frankfurt School who coined the term, "culture industry" was an <WSD>oxymoron</WSD>, intended to set up a critical contrast between the exploitative, repetitive mode of industrial mass production under capitalism and the associations of transformative power and aesthetico-moral transcendence that the concept of culture carried in the 1940s, when it still meant "high" culture. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A figure of speech in which two words or phrases with opposing meanings are used together intentionally for effect.