Aesthetic Theory: Volume 88

"The darkening of the world makes rational the irrational in art: it's an irrationality radically obscured". "The art doesn't imitate neither the nature nor to a concrete natural beauty, but the natural beauty by itself." "The efforts of the art by saving, in the remaining, all the transient, flowing and temporal, defending it from the stuffing though art is familiarized with it, bear a tension between the objectifying technique and the mimetic essence of the works." "Aesthetical theory" is a huge compendium of smart ideas, a whole corpus of clever and revealing concepts about the role of the art. His architectural intelligence and supreme erudition literally is an engaging tour de force, an impressive gallery of sharp reflections that will motivate you, dear reader. Since I acquired it, this book has become one of my cult texts, whose relevant importance remains beyond any other superlative you want to label it.

Adorno is not famous for his writing style. His prose is dense, and sometimes impenetrable for the English reader. Yet, I think Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is one of the greatest books of XX century philosophy along with Heidegger's "Being and Time", and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I think there are three levels of reflection in this book. The first is that AT is a sociology of art. Adorno traces the social and economic conditions of how modern art becomes to being. Industrialization and modernization have a great impact on aesthetics because perception and reality are fundamentally altered. Adorno makes the case that the destruction of nature by industry makes art to find its reality elsewhere and, hence, it becomes abstract. Art does not want to imitate nature anymore since nature is already destroyed. It escapes to the realm of idea(l)s in order to critique the current state of being. The critical nature of modern art makes for the second level of Adorno's reading which is the aesthetic. Aesthetics in modernism becomes an instrument of social critique. Before, in the time of Kant and the idealists, aesthetic was the study of beauty and artistic genius. Now, according to Adorno, it becomes the study of social disintegration in which the artist is just the "unfortunate" medium to express it. Yet, Adorno is not a complete pessimist. (Although his arrogance and snobbery concerning "lower" popular art is of the worst kind. His favorite artists are the European ultra-elite: Mahler, Kafka, Schonberg). He sees in aesthetic reflection a tool for utopian transformation. This is the third level of reading AT -the philosophical or utopian. Modern art, because it critiques this world for the sake of a better one, is also philosophy. Since philosophy was the discipline that established how the real and ideal are separated, modern art also shows this gap, and treats beauty as a poor substitute for happiness. Beauty, once idealized by the elite, becomes a sign of the powerlessness of art to transform the world. This impotence, still, is a sign of art's utopian power. This kind of paradoxical reasoning is typical of Adorno, and it is loaded with theological significance. Art promises something that cannot be delivered, but who delivers then?

If he doesn't like Curtis Mayfield. Should he?

Adorno keeps your mind at thinking, not consuming thoughts. Even when you disagree with his brilliant idiosyncrasies they provoce you to think about modern art, philosophy and society.

Theodor Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory" is in one respect about the end of art;it was written partially in response to his friend Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's views on the ends of art and the pontentialities, the encrusted meanings waiting to me unleashed in mass produced art. Benjamin had thought there was an emancipatory moment in art in now the age of mechanical production. Since Adorno had outlived Benjamin until 1969, Adorno's task was to furnish us with the conception of art now as a pennyless child gazing into the candystore, an art in exile, an art where the disintegration of cultural pillars have long eroded away. Schoenberg's varigated orchestral scores was the ultimate rebellion in a private world, the subject at last trying to find truth and resemblance within the aesthetic crumbs leftover from the 19th century.Adorno's " Aesthetic Theory" is not only a treatise, a counterflow, a tone-poem of fragments, symphonic forms exploded into motives and cells of thought, it is a bridge between all arts,although the relativily new form of film is neglected. Adorno had thought this fragmentary style of writing as satisfying with the collapse of system-building within philosophic thought.The aesthetic strategy of Adorno's thought then is one which interfaces, interrelates, crosses itself in its various readings of art. And the reader expects this complexity to be apparent. Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation is indeed something which encourages this reading of Adorno. He allows us to enter Adorno's thought in its full complexity. So, graphically he allows the undivision of paragraphs to remain as Adorno had originally composed in draft form. Adorno's thought continually overflows,continually creates layers, multilayers of references. Hullot-Kentor's term "paratactical form" is the localized struture of Adorno's thought and if form at all survives it is within this density of Adorno's thought and not any external structure. The first English translation by C. Lenhardt(1984)! maintains these divisions within the body of text and is still indespensible despite all the American jargon.Adorno's thought on first encounter needs all the divisions one can find,but once learned you can move beyond it into Hullot-Kentor's. The introduction to Hullot-Kentor provides a good history of Adorno's work with aesthetics a subject he came to late within these treatise-like dimensions. Adorno has been the focus of numerous studies, Frederic Jameson,Martin Jay, Albrecht Wellmer,Peter Berger, as well as art critics Donald Kuspit. Lambert Zuidervaart has a book-length critique of "Aesthetic Theory". All have used Adorno's thought to advance a particular cause mostly justified.Jameson's diatribes with the post-structural cadre for one, Wellmer in making a bridge to the communicative theories of Adorno's former assistant Jurgan Habermas. Who has been left out of this theoretical landscape? has been the practicing artist, and understandibly so for those I've mentioned are