T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970): Combining strands from Kant, Hegel, and Marx, this text repeatedly engages in dialectics of form and content to conclude that modern art is philosophically significant. Due to its autonomous nature, modern art provides a space for aesthetic production that incorporates disparate aspects of human experience, challenges existing social conditions, and concomitantly presents utopian notions of freedom.

Adorno writes for an audience concerned with intersections between philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, the death of religion, and the crisis of meaning in modern society. He assumes his audience is familiar with “modern” art produced in the West since 1910, theories of Western philosophy, and the body of work originating more or less with Sigmund Freud.

Deeply concerned that Eurocentric discussions regarding the meaning of human existence are headed in the wrong direction, Adorno disagrees to some extent with ideas advanced by Marx and Benjamin that art should serve primarily as a political tool. Referencing Hegel, Adorno notes that art is never static and is always becoming; it changes over time and through different cultural constructions. The dialectic of art resembles Marx's social/labor dialectic as they both have the same teleology (7), but art is an autonomous entity, as a "momentary standing still," and as a fractured social artifact (9, 10).

Adorno wrestles here with nihilism. He wants to call attention to modern art, primarily visual work and drama, and its inherent ability to authentically engage with a crisis of meaning. He challenges the utility of psychoanalytic theory because he feels that alienation and the desire to bring about a better world are more than a purely subjective language of the unconscious. He also finds Kant's work to be too limiting because it focuses on a concept of disinterestedness, which ignores the central importance of satisfaction and pleasure with respect to aesthetic experience. Modern art can speak directly to domination or repression, and the fact that social conditions deny happiness, but it can simultaneously promise that happiness does indeed lie elsewhere (17). Adorno is calling attention to this phenomenon as a way to redeem the site of art as a space for meaning or signification, to move intellectual thinking away from the view that art only serves as a space of pure negation.


Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1977) : Building upon Adorno’s work, Marcuse affirms that art is revolutionary, but he argues that art’s ability to be autonomous allows art to function as an ideology, rather than as just a political, class-reconfiguring kind of tool. Art can resist social oppression, but then also transcend this same repression (or sublimate it) to re-present new sensibilities of pleasure and freedom.

Marcuse assumes his audience has an intimate familiarity with Adorno’s work and Marxist theory. His analysis works primarily through literature and drama to explore the specific qualities of art that transcend socio-historical contexts of production and still allow this medium to present or enact universal principles. He agrees that art can change political consciousness, but he wants to demonstrate that art can also change more fundamental, more “inward” aspects of human consciousness and he reminds his audience that both kinds of transformation are important steps toward achieving true liberation. Essentially, Marcuse wants Marxism to address basic human needs for beauty (fulfillment, tranquility, freedom) and sensation (including the erotic and pleasure).

I was drawn to Marcuse’s invocation of Proust, the way that Marcuse highlighted art’s motivating ability to preserve a remembrance of things past—its ability to memorialize moments of gratification and happiness or pleasure, as well as moments of human failure. Can this really happen if art (in infinite forms) is not in general circulation? Can this happen if art is only available as a discourse for the privileged, or a privileged leisure class?

I also have questions regarding the specific examples of art each author seems to be valuing. If I am reading Adorno correctly, not all forms of modern art fit within his analysis, and Marcuse does not seem to like Warhol too much. I am trying to identify specific examples of art that can function in form and content as the kind of universal envisioned by Adorno and Marcuse. At the same time, classifications and taxonomies are dangerously limiting and it seems that both authors were very careful to avoid this trap. Thoughts?