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app-ara-tus · 5 years

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Adorno. Aesthetic

Notes on Aesthetic

In its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

Nothing is more damaging to theoretical knowledge of modern art than its reduction to what it has in common with older periods

Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become eloquent; this is why art no longer tolerates the innocuous.

Abstract art. This abstractness has nothing in common with the formal character of older aesthetic norms such as Kant's. On the contrary, it is a provocation, it challenges the illusion that life goes on, and at the same time it is a means for that aesthetic distancing that traditional fantasy no longer achieves.

the concept of the avant-garde, reserved for many decades for whatever movement declared itself the most advanced, now has some of the comic quality of aged youth.

Isms are, so to speak, the secularization of these schools in an age that destroyed them as traditionalistic. Isms are scandalous because they do not fit into the schema of absolute individuation but remain as an island of a tradition that was shattered by the principle of individuation.

The concept of the archaic defines not so much a phase of art history as the condition of works that have gone dead.

Rather than being tragic, all art is mournful, especially those works that appear cheerful and harmonious.

As soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration, they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death: The veneer of inalienability that they draw over themselves at the same time suffocates them.

aesthetic radicalism has shown itself to be socially affordable, radicalism itself must pay the price that it is no longer radical.

there is no art without individuation.

Art is modern when, by its mode of experience and as the expression of the crisis of experience, it absorbs what industrialization has developed under the given relations of production.

Modem art is questionable not when it goes too far—as the cliche runs—but when it does not go far enough, which is the point at which works falter out of a lack of internal consistency.

art is now scarcely possible unless it does experiment. work should have contents that are not foreseeable in the process of production, that, subjectively, the artist should be surprised by the work that results.

As play, art seeks to absolve itself of the guilt of its semblance. ...absolute irresponsibility degrades art to fun; a synthesis of responsibility and irresponsibility is precluded by the concept itself. Art brings to light what is infantile in the ideal of being grown up. Immaturity via maturity is the prototype of play.

The injustice committed by all cheerful art, especially by entertainment, is probably an injustice to the dead; to accumulated, speechless pain.

art is no replica of the subject

Art is the historico-philosophical truth of a solipsism that is untrue in-itself.

the ugly must constitute, or be able to constitute, an element of art.

According to a Hegelian topos, beauty is the result not of a simple equilibrium per se, but rather of the tension that results.

The impression of ugliness stems from the principle of violence and destruction. In technique, violence toward nature is not reflected through artistic portrayal, but it is immediately apparent.

the old images of terror persist in history, which has yet to redeem the promise of freedom, and in which the subject—as the agent of unfreedom—perpetuates the mythical spell, against which he rebels and to which he is subordinate.

The ambiguousness of the ugly results from the fact that the subject subsumes under the abstract and formal category of ugliness everything condemned by art: polymorphous sexuality as well as the violently mutilated and lethal.

The aesthetic of pleasure, once free of crude materiality, coincides with mathematical relations in the artistic object.

in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image, even if in this too the possibility persists that sympathy with the degraded will reverse into concurrence with degradation.

The aesthetic condemnation of the ugly is dependent on the inclination, verified by social psychology, to equate, justly, the ugly with the expression of suffering and, by projecting it, to despise it.

what is hostile to art into art's own agent, which thus extends art's concept beyond that of the ideal.

Cruelty is an element of art's critical reflection on itself; art despairs over the claim to power that it fulfills in being reconciled. Cruelty steps forward unadorned from the artworks as soon as their own spell is broken. The mythical terror of beauty extends into artworks as their irresistibility, a trait once attributed to Aphrodite Peithon.

That is the melancholy of art. It achieves an unreal reconciliation at the price of real reconciliation.

it is for the sake of the beautiful that there is no longer beauty: because it is no longer beautiful.

art as an image of reconciliation.

Only by way of this disappearance, not by cozy ing up to reality, does the artwork break through merely subjective reason.

romantic art. it is only through its darkness that this art can outmaneuver the demystified world and cancel the spell that this world casts by the overwhelming force of its appearance, the fetish character of the commodity

Natural Beauty

the artwork to nature as the mediated plenipotentiary of immediacy.

Natural beauty vanished from aesthetics as a result of the burgeoning domination of the concept of freedom and human dignity, which was inaugurated by Kant and then rigorously transplanted into aesthetics by Schiller and Hegel.

the most profound force of resistance stored in the cultural landscape is the expression of history that is compelling, aesthetically, because it is etched by the real suffering of the past. The figure of the constrained gives happiness because the force of constraint must not be forgotten; its images are a memento.

Without historical remembrance there would be no beauty.

Art is not nature, a belief that idealism hoped to inculcate, but art does want to keep nature's promise. It is capable of this only by breaking that promise; by taking it back into itself.

the ambiguity of natural beauty has its origin in mythical ambiguity

Pure immediacy does not suffice for aesthetic experience.

What is beautiful in nature is what appears to be more than what is literally there. Natural beauty points to the primacy of the object in subjective experience.

Natural beauty suffers the same fate as does education: It is vitiated as the inevitable consequence of its expansion.

Art does not imitate nature, not even individual instances of natural beauty, but natural beauty as such.

The beauty of regularity is "a beauty of abstract understanding.

On Hegel’s thoughts . Natural beauty gains legitimacy only by its decline, in such a way that its deficiency becomes the raison d'etre of art beauty.

Art beauty is what is objectively mastered in an image and which by virtue of its objectivity transcends domination.

Art attempts to imitate an expression that would not be interpolated human intention. The latter is exclusively art's vehicle. The more perfect the artwork, the more it forsakes intentions.

If the language of nature is mute, art seeks to make this muteness eloquent; art thus exposes itself to failure through the insurmountable contradiction between the idea of making the mute eloquent, which demands a desperate effort, and the idea of what this effort would amount to, the idea of what cannot in any way be willed.

Artworks are images as apparition, as appearance, and not as a copy. In art something momentary transcends; objectivation makes the artwork into an instant.

Artworks not only produce imagines as something that endures. They become artworks just as much through the destruction of their own imageries for this reason art is profoundly akin to explosion.

art today is scarcely conceivable except as a form of reaction that anticipates the apocalypse

The view of art as politically engaged or didactic regresses back of this stage of enlightenment.

Not everything that exists is spirit, yet art is an entity that through its configurations becomes something spiritual.

It is precisely radical art that, while refusing the desideratum of realism, stands in a relation of tension to the symbol.

art itself thinks

The artwork is at once process and instant.

Aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy.

Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.

There is nothing in art, not even in the most sublime, that does not derive from the world; nothing that remains untransformed.

Aesthetic success is essentially measured by whether the formed object is able to awaken the content [Inhalt] sedimented in the form. In general, then, the hermeneutics of artworks is the translation of their formal elements into content [Inhalt].

Artworks, however, that negate meaning must also necessarily be disrupted in their unity;

In capitalism, what forces art against art into an alliance with the vulgar is not only a function of commercialism, which exploits a mutilated sexuality, but equally the dark side of Christian inwardness.

Contemporary aesthetics is dominated by the controversy over whether it is subjective or objective. These terms, however, are equivocal.

The difference between truth and intention in artworks becomes evident to critical consciousness when the object of the artist's intention is itself false, those usually eternal truths in which myth simply reiterates itself.

Philosophy and art converge in their truth content: The progressive self-unfolding truth of the artwork is none other than the truth of the philosophical concept

Form Form is the seal of social labor Form seeks to bring the particular to speech through the whole Form inevitably limits what is formed Without rejection there is no form: process of selecting, trimming, renouncing. Everything appearing in the artwork is virtually content [Inhalt] as much as it is form, whereas form remains that by which the appearing determines itself and content remains what is self-determining. The articulation, by which the artwork achieves its form, also always coincides in a certain sense with the defeat of form. Without intention, without the immanent form of the principle of identity, form would not exist any more than it would without the mimetic impulse

Content is everything that transpires in time

Material It is the sum of all that is available to artists forms too can become material The substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials. The mastery over the material implies spiritualization, though this spiritualization, as the autonomy of spirit vis-a-vis its other, immediately endangers itself again.

Meaning Artworks that divest themselves of any semblance of meaning do not thereby forfeit their similitude to language. They enunciate their meaninglessness with the same determinacy as traditional artworks enunciate their positive meaning. Today this is the capacity of art: Through the consistent negation of meaning it does justice to the postulates that once constituted the meaning of artworks. Radical consistency, even that called absurd, culminates in similitude to meaning. Art is unable to escape the suggestion of meaning

Technique/ Metiér/ Craft whereby artworks are organized as purposeful in a way that is denied to empirical existence artworks become purposeful only through technique, the medium of art's crystallization, does art distance itself from the prosaic Technique insures that the artwork is more than an agglomeration of what is factually available.

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No artwork is only what it aspires to be, but there is none that is more than this without aspiring to be something.

To be genial means to hit upon a constellation, subjectively to achieve the objective, it is the instant in which the methexis of the artwork in language allows convention to be discarded as accidental

Aesthetic spirituality

Art is spiritualized not by the ideas it affirms but through the ele mental—the intentionless—that is able to receive the spirit in itself; the dialectic of the elemental and spirit is the truth content

The sublime as semblance has its own absurdity and contributes to the neutralization of truth. The feeling of the sublime does not correspond immediately with what appears.

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Immersion in the individual work, which is contrary to genres, leads to an awareness of that work's immanent lawfulness.

Construction is equally able to codify the resignation of the weakened subject and to make absolute alienation the sole concern of art— Nothing social in art is immediately social, not even when this is its aim.

Abstaining from praxis, art becomes the schema of social praxis: Every authentic artwork is internally revolutionary. art has the power to resist the compact majority—a resistance that has become a criterion of the work and its social truth—in the lonely and exposed producer of art, while at the same time this does not exclude collective forms of production

Art is not an arbitrary cultural complement to science but, rather, stands in critical tension to it.

The constellation of the existing and nonexisting is the utopic figure of art.

how it is that art, whose a priori gesture protests against vulgarity, is yet capable of being integrated with the vulgar.

Artworks are archaic in the age in which they are falling silent. But when they no longer speak, their muteness itself speaks.

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