willow: "Art’s inescapable affirmative essence has become insufferable. Art must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fiber."

Alt Text

Art’s inescapable affirmative essence has become insufferable. Art must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fiber.

March 4, 2024 at 8:42 PM

1quote

willowJan 24, 2025

alt text backfill

adorno, aesthetic theory, 39-40

Whoever concretely enjoys artworks is a philistine; he is convicted by expressions like "a feast for the ears." Yet if the last traces of pleasure were extirpated, the question of what artworks are for would be an
embarrassment. Actually, the more they are understood, the less they are enjoyed. Formerly, even the traditional attitude to the artwork, if it was to be absolutely relevant to the work, was that of admiration that the works exist as they do in themselves and not for the sake of the observer. What opened up to, and overpowered, the beholder was their truth, which as in works of Kafka's type outweighs every other element. They were not a higher order of amusement. The relation to art was not that of its physical devouring; on the contrary, the beholder disappeared into the material; this is even more so in modern works that shoot toward the viewer as on occasion a locomotive does in a film. Ask a musician if the music is a pleasure, the reply is likely to be as in the American joke of the grimacing cellist under Toscanini-"I just hate music." For him who has a genuine relation to art, in which he himself vanishes, art is not an object; deprivation of art would be unbearable for him, yet he does not consider individual works sources of joy. Incontestably, no one would devote himself to art without—as the bourgeois put it-getting something out of it; yet this is not true in the sense that a balance sheet could be drawn up: "heard the Ninth Symphony tonight, enjoyed myself so and so much" even though such feeble-mindedness has by now established itself as common sense. The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better.

adorno, aesthetic theory, 69

By an inherent tendency, important artworks annihilate everything of their own time that does not achieve their standard. Rancor is therefore one of the reasons why so many of the cultured oppose radical modern art: The murderous historical force of the modern is equated with the disintegration of all that to which the proprietors of culture despairingly cling. Modern art is questionable not when it goes too far—as the cliché runs but when it does not go far enough, which is the point at which works falter out of a lack of internal consistency. Only works that expose themselves to every risk have the chance of living on, not those that out of fear of the ephemeral cast their lot with the past.

adorno, aesthetic theory, 46

Those who have been duped by the culture industry and are eager for its commodities were never familiar with art: They are therefore able to perceive art's inadequacy to the present life process of society though not society's own untruth more unobstructedly than do those who still remember what an artwork once was.
They push for the deaestheticization of art. 4 Its unmistakable symptom is the passion to touch everything, to allow no work to be what it is, to dress it up, to narrow its distance from its viewer. The humiliating difference between art and the life people lead, and in which they do not want to be bothered because they could not bear it otherwise, must be made to disappear: This is the subjective basis for classifying art among the consumer goods under the control of vested interests.

adorno, aesthetic theory, 76

To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black. Much contemporary production is irrelevant because it takes no note of this and childishly delights in color. The ideal of blackness with regard to content is one of the deepest impulses of abstraction. It may well be that the current trifling with sound and color effects is a reaction to the impoverishment entailed by the ideal of black; perhaps art will one day be able to abolish this axiom without self-betrayal, which is what Brecht may have sensed when he wrote: "What times are these, when /to speak of trees is almost a crime / because it passes in silence over such infamy!