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willow
patpatpatpat basically the idea is that art should (can?) not be instrumental to anything else, reflect reality, or be “useful” in any traditional sense to be meaningful. kant thought this autonomy was transhistorical, adorno thinks kants autonomy of art is vital but historicizes it with hegel
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willow
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raymond geuss, art and criticism in adorno, outside ethics, 168 Works of art for Adorno are inherently useless objects which present an "image" (Bild) of a kind of meaningfulness and freedom which society promises its members but does not provide. The fact that art is both something many people find meaningful-even if it isn't clear what "meaningful" means—and yet something which by most of the standards of everyday life is useless, is already for Adorno a good sign, because it violates the Enlightenment principle of universal functionalism, that is, the principle that everything must be useful for something, and that the meaningful and the functional are inherently connected. 13 Brecht's views but not necessarily his actual theatrical practice, which, Adorno admits, was more sophisticated.