Art and Resistance in Adorno: The avant-garde artwork as the foundation of the social critique (original) (raw)

Art and society in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

2021

The main theme of this text is the relations between art and society as woven by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, giving special emphasis, among others, to the concepts of disartification of art, truth content, authentic art and dissonance. To fulfill this purpose, we shall use the text of Adorno already mentioned, as well as other texts by the same author on specific issues and the support of scholars such as Rodrigo Duarte, Marc Jimenez and Marcia Tiburi, among others.

Adorno's Aesthetic Model of Social Critique

Blackwell Companion to Adorno, ed. Espen Hammer, Peter Gordon, Max Pensky

Aesthetics, in many ways, is at the center of Adorno's philosophical enterprise. Politics, and social critique, are in turn very much at the fore in his aesthetics. His art criticism is thereby bound up with social and political critique. That much is of course a truism about Adorno. In this essay, I shall suggest that Adorno's social criticism (in one of its main manifestations) is related to his art criticism in another interesting way as well. Specifically, their form is similar. The object of critical analysis, whether an artwork or other social phenomenon, is objectionable not simply because it promotes or fosters problematic things downstream-authoritarianism, anti-semitism, and the like-as cause to effect. Rather, it is objectionable because it contains, often in a way difficult immediately to detect, such objectionable ideologies covertly embedded in it. Critique will thus be a hermeneutic endeavor seeking to expose these ideologies. While this critical-interpretive model is of course more familiar in the aesthetic sphere, Adorno extends it to unmasking a wider range of social phenomena.

Truth and Enigma: Adorno and the Politics of Art

New German Critique, 2018

This article reappraises the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics in the aftermath of the postmodern debate. It proposes a shift of focus from the concept of “semblance character” to the concept of “enigmatic character” in order to grasp what Adorno means by the “truth content” of artworks. This theoretical move is meant to shed new light on how Adorno sees the relationship between art and politics. The inclusion of Adorno in the tradition of the beautiful and his portrayal as a forerunner of Jean-François Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime are flawed. In other words, artworks would be true not because of what they make apparent or acknowledge as unpresentable but because their enigmatic complexion unleashes a crisis of comprehension that challenges our understanding of the world. A “maybe” emblematizes the enigma, whose imaginative appropriation remains truer to emancipation than any utopia or dystopia could ever become.

Art as a Form of Negative Dialectics: 'Theory' in Adorno's 'Aesthetic Theory'

Journal of Speculative Philospohy , 1997

In an effort to clarify Adorno's aesthetic position, I argue that Adorno embraces a version of the Kantian thesis concerning art's autonomy and that he criticizes transcendental philosophy. I discuss how Adorno provides the outlines for a dialectical conception of artistic truth and how this aspect of Adorno's thinking is applied in his argument with Hegel. This paper also engages Adorno's assessment of the Enlightenment through his interpretation of twentieth-century literature. Returning to the example of art as a sign of historical truth, I conclude my study by stressing the political implications of Adorno's position.

"Index of the Contemporary: Adorno, Art, Natural History"

Evental Aesthetics: Aesthetic Intersections 2. Vol. 7, No. 2, 2018

That contemporary art is fundamentally irreducible to modernist art and aesthetics has become a commonplace of contemporary art theory and criticism. In marking this distinction, reference is often made to the obsolescence of once-dominant aesthetic categories and the need for breaking with aesthetic theories traditionally allied with artistic modernism. For many in the field of philosophical aesthetics, this means going beyond the work of Theodor W. Adorno and creating a conceptual discourse more appropriate to the current state of contemporary art. The present paper reconstructs the stakes of this legitimation crisis and sets Adorno’s writings on art and aesthetics in relation to some of the most significant debates in recent art criticism. In the process, it demonstrates that many of the most pressing problems in contemporary art are integral to Adorno’s aesthetic theory and that it is precisely at those points where his thought is today regarded as most problematic that it is often most instructive. Through a sustained examination of art’s essential relation to what Adorno calls “natural-history,” the problems of contemporary art and aesthetics are then situated within the wider context of art’s relationship to a history of domination.

Adorno, Brecht and Debord: Three Models for Resisting the Capitalist Art System

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2014

The article presents three models of radical cultural practice: Adorno's dissonant modernism, Brecht's "functional transformation" or "refunctioning" of institutions through estrangement and dialectical realism, and Debord's Situationist détournement of art, aiming to rupture and decolonize naturalized everyday life. The three models all begin with a critical appropriation of the traditions of art and aims at resisting the social power that passes through art, as an institutionalized field of production and activity. Each of the three modes establishes a set of productive strategies. k e y wor d s Critical art, Adorno, Brecht, Debord

Adorno, Brecht, Debord: Three Models for Resisting the Capitalist Art System

Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2013

The article presents three models of radical cultural practice: Adorno’s dissonant modernism, Brecht’s “functional transformation” or “re- functioning” of institutions through estrangement and dialectical realism, and Debord’s Situationist detournement of art, aiming to rupture and de- colonize naturalized everyday life. The three models all begin with a critical appropriation of the traditions of art and aims at resisting the social power that passes through art, as an institutionalized field of production and activity. Each of the three modes establishes a set of productive strategies.

The Spiritualization of Art in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory

Adorno Studies, 2017

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno discusses the progressive spiritualization of art over the course of two centuries. By excluding natural beauty, art established itself as a realm of freedom created by the autonomous subject. Yet, similar to the process of rationalization that Adorno and Horkheimer describe in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, spiritualization also exposes the autonomy of art to the return of the repressed. In this paper, I establish a distinction in Adorno's work between spiritualization in its traditional sense, which designates this cycle of repression and return, and spiritualization in its radical sense, as the process that turns art against its history of domination. Spiritualization in this latter sense is the basis for an encounter with the repressed that exhibits a non- dominating stance toward otherness.