Art and Aesthetics after Adorno (original) (raw)
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Art and Aesthetics after Adorno - eScholarship
2010
Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century. It is coupled with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be. But the cultural horizon of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, and much has happened since then both in theory and in practice. Adorno’s powerful vision of aesthetics calls for reconsideration in this light. Must his work be defended, updated, resisted, or simply left behind? This volume gathers new essays by leading philosophers, critics, and theorists writing in the wake of Adorno in order to address these questions. They hold in common a deep respect for the power of Adorno’s aesthetic critique and a concern for the future of aesthetic theory in response to ...
's Aesthetic Theory illuminates the basic question of the aesthetic claim to truth. Adorno's text presents key philosophical questions about the nature of aesthetics. Through grounding Adorno's aesthetic theory in Hegelian logic, this article explicates why and how the veracity of a modern artwork dwells in its claim to the truth of its own untruth. What is the relation between aesthetic truth and the objective truth of empirical reality? Can aesthetic truth disclose the truth of empirical reality? By relating negatively to what Adorno calls the empirical reality, modern artworks not only become identical to their nonidentity, but also present that which they are nonidentical with as their formative ground. If the truth of an object is mediated, aesthetic truth must disclose the degree of objectivity found in empirical reality. Consequently, aesthetic truth becomes for-itself a mediated truth, and aesthetic truth comes to reveal the mediatedness of empirical reality.
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2023
In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that, in modernity, art and philosophy are reciprocally dependent upon each other for legitimation and critical force. This claim has puzzled scholars and provoked controversy. I argue that Adorno's thesis may be comprehended in the following manner: art requires philosophy because, without the latter, art would lack the power to critique social and historical reality (in particular, the ideological elements that often remain invisible as second nature), and to rationally interpret the material particularity expressed by such reality; and, conversely, philosophy requires art because the latter expresses historical experience to reason. Such material historical experience is necessary in order to prevent philosophy from falling into ideological convention; idle speculation; or abstract and reified instrumentality. Thus, the constellation of history, art, and philosophy is essential to Adorno's aesthetics.
Aesthetics: From Kant to Adorno
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with questions regarding the nature of beauty, taste, and art. What makes something beautiful? Is beauty something universal? What counts as art? Can anyone make art, or is art solely the domain of the artistic genius? In the history of philosophy, these questions have been raised and answered most thoroughly in the German Aesthetic Tradition, which spans roughly from the 18th to the 20th century. This class introduces students to this rich and foundational tradition by examining the influential writings of Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno. Successful completion of the course means that students will be able to identify, analyze, and distinguish among the major themes and figures in the German Aesthetic Tradition.
Natural History and Aesthetic Truth in Aesthetic Theory
New German Critique, 2021
Since at least the beginning of the 1990s, sympathetic readers of Theodor W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory have struggled to make sense of his account of the truth content of the artwork. 1 The seemingly Hegelian commitment to the claim that art has such content stands high on the list of interpretive challenges precluding a full reappreciation of the work. 2 This article continues that practice, with some differences. The motivating question here focuses on Adorno's insistence in Aesthetic Theory that artworks bear a distinctive form of insight. This privileged insight discloses objective conditions about reality that, but for artistic truth, remain cloaked and inaccessible, and that the release or disclosure of truth content requires that the nondiscursive structure of the artwork interact in a specified mannercritical interpretation-with a related form of spirit, namely, the discursively structured practice of philosophical thinking. As I discuss in the final section, this view of art's truth content having an important reference to social condi
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.