History, critique, experience: On the dialectical relationship between art and philosophy in Adorno's aesthetic theory (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
'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.
Art and Aesthetics after Adorno
Townsend Center For the Humanities, 2010
Published one year after his death, Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) is without any doubt one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deep and critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the twentieth century. It is coupled, moreover, with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be as a form of critique if it is to meet the demands made by artworks. As such, it opens the project of critical theory to the unique set of pressures created by the class of objects-meaningful, sensuous, and particular-that we have come to recognize as "works of art." But the forward-looking horizon of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, where the existence of "art" had already come into question; its background was European art from roughly the time of Bach to the present. Much has happened since then both in practice and in theory, including revisions of aesthetic theory in light of a much broader view of the history of art.
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 ...
"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.
Dialectical Aesthetics and the Kantian Rettung: On Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
Resisting the coercion of accepted standards of objectivity, Adorno defends subjective experience: Just how vacuous the formal objection to subjective relativity is, can be seen in the particular fi eld of the latter, that of aesthetic judgements. Anyone who, drawing on the strength of his precise reaction to a work of art, has ever subjected himself in earnest to its discipline, to its immanent formal law, the compulsion of its structure, will fi nd that objections to the merely subjective quality of his experience vanish like a pitiful illusion: and every step that he takes, by virtue of his highly subjective innervation, towards the heart of the matter, has incomparably greater objective force than the comprehensive and fully backed-up analyses of such things as " style, " whose claims to scien-tifi c status are made at the expense of such experience. 1 This passage is from " Unfair Intimidation, " the second of a series of three aphorisms from the fi rst part of Minima Moralia that explicitly consider the
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.