Abstract
Constellations between artworks (objects) and spectators (subjects) can be profoundly puzzling. They are especially so in the hands of Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969): a self-styled ‘uncompromisingly critical thinker’1 and self-professed artist,2 working between theory and practice, in the Freudo-Marxian tradition of German Enlightenment philosophy (Kant and Hegel), known to us today as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.3
To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black. (AT 39)
But because for art, utopia — the yet-to-exist — is draped in black, it remains in all its mediations recollection; recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; (…) it is freedom, which under the spell of necessity did not — and may not ever — come to pass. (AT 135)
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Notes
Adorno, T. W. [1969], ‘Resignation,’ Trans. Henry E. Pickford, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 292. Hereafter cited in the text as: R.
‘I, however, by background and early development, was an artist, a musician, yet animated by an impulse to account for art and its possibility in the present, where something objective desired expression as well.’ Adorno, cited here in: Buck-Morss, S. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 234, note 10. Hereafter cited in the text as OND.
See: Wiggershaus, R. [1986], The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, Trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Hereafter cited in the text as FS.
See also: Jay, M. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973).
Bürger, P. [1974], Theory of the Avant-Garde, Trans. Michael Shaw, Foreword Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 94. Hereafter cited in the text as TAG.
According to Nicolaus Schafhausen and Vanessa Joan Müller: ‘Art — for Adorno it meant above all music, then literature, then painting. His writings contain many unspecified references to “the artwork.” By contrast, concrete works in the visual arts play a rather subordinate role within the oeuvre of the author of Aesthetic Theory.’ Schafhausen, N. and Müller, V. J. ‘Preface,’ Trans. James Gussen and Steven Lindberg, Adorno: The Possibility of the Impossible; Volume II, Eds. Nicolaus Schafhausen, Vanessa Joan Müller, and Michael Hirsch (Frankfurt: Frankfurt Kunstverein, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2003), 7. Hereafter cited in the text as Pr.
Wellmer, A. [1984/1985], ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation: Adorno’s Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity,’ Trans. Maeve Cooke, Theodor W. Adorno: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory; Volume IV, Ed. Simon Jarvis (Oxford: Routledge, 2007), 197. Hereafter cited in the text as TSR.
Beyond the aforementioned texts, it is worth pointing the reader toward the following titles, which the author has himself found most helpful: Jarvis, S. Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998);
Jay, M. Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984);
Weber Nicholsen, S. Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997);
Rose, G. The MelancholyScience: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: The Macmillan Press, 1978);
Berman, R. A. Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989);
Hohendahl, P. U. ‘Autonomy of Art: Looking Back at Adorno’s Äesthetische Theorie,’ The German Quarterly, Volume 54, Number 2, March 1981 (Oxford: Blackwell);
Wellmer, A. [1985/1986], The Persistence of Memory: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism, Trans. David Midgley (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991);
Huyssen, A. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986);
Düttmann, A. G. ‘Art’s Address,’ Adorno: The Possibility of the Impossible: Volume I, Eds Nicolaus Schafhausen, Vanessa Joan Müller, and Michael Hirsch (Frankfurt: Frankfurt Kunstverein, Lukas & Sternberg, 2003).
Peter Osborne’s book, Anywhere or Not At All, provides an enormous service by dividing aesthetic theory after Adorno into those studies that are either Kantorientated or Benjamin- / Marxian-orientated. The former includes: Menke, C. The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, Trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1998);
Bernstein, J. M. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006);
Bernstein, J. M. (et al.), Art and Aesthetics After Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
I would add the following to Osborne’s Kant-orientated list: Bernstein, J. M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992);
Roberts, D. Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991);
Zuidervaart, L. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991);
Huhn, T. and Zuidervaart, L. (Eds), The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997).
The Benjamin- / Marxian-orientated list may include: Martin, S. [2000], ‘Autonomy and Anti-Art: Adorno’s Concept of Avant-Garde Art,’ Theodor W. Adorno: SAGE Masters of Modern Social Thought: Volume II, Ed. Gerard Delanty (London: SAGE Publications, 2004); Martin, S. ‘The Absolute Artwork Meets the Absolute Commodity,’ Radical Philosophy, 146 (November/December 2007); Roberts, J. [2000], ‘After Adorno: Art Autonomy, and Critique — A Literature Review,’ Historical Materialism, 7 (Winter 2000); Osborne, P. ‘Adorno and the Metaphysics of Modernism: The Problem of a “Postmodern” Art,’ Theodor W. Adorno: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory; Volume IV, Ed. Simon Jarvis (Oxford: Routledge, 2007);
Osborne, P. Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013). Two articles by Robert Kaufman, perhaps, disturb Osborne’s division:
Kaufman, R. ‘Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde,’ Critical Inquiry, Volume 27, Number 2, Winter 2001 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press);
Kaufman, R. ‘Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third “Critique” in Adorno and Jameson,’ Critical Inquiry, Volume 26, Number 4, Summer 2000 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).
Important essays on Adorno’s work have been collected together in two separate, four-volume, editions: Delanty, G. (Ed.), Theodor W. Adorno: SAGE Masters of Modern Social Thought: Volumes I–IV (London: SAGE Publications, 2004).
Jarvis, S. (Ed.), Theodor W. Adorno: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory; Volumes I–IV, Ed. Simon Jarvis (Oxford: Routledge, 2007).
Adorno’s method ‘is quite consistent with the idea that the object cannot be captured, and that a set of presentations may best approximate it. Adorno sometimes calls this a ‘constellation,’ and he also describes this way of composing texts as ‘paratactic,’ ‘concentric,’ ‘as a spider’s web,’ and as a ‘densely woven carpet.’ Rose, G. The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: The Macmillan Press, 1978), 13. Hereafter cited in the text as: MS. It is the production of a densely woven carpet that is attempted here.
Adorno, T. W. [1962], ‘Commitment,’ Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Notes to Literature: Volume Two, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 89. Hereafter cited in the text as C.
See (DE 63, 74). See also: Adorno, T. W. [1969], ‘Critique,’ Trans. Henry W. Pickford, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 282. ‘We were and remained “Nay-sayers,” in the tradition of Hegel’s particular form of negation; each one of us tried to express what was wrong in his particular field and, therefore, in our society.
We were consciously on the periphery of established power.’ Löwenthal, L. An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Löwenthal, Ed. Martin Jay (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 166.
Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘Spengler After the Decline,’ Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1983) 63.
‘Every line of mine opposes this’ ‘massification,’ which ‘is something done to the masses by the clean-cut cliques and individuals who administer them and then deride them for being “the masses.”’ Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘An Open Letter to Rolf Hochhuth,’ Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Notes to Literature: Volume Two, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 245.
‘Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.’ Staretz Silouan cited here in: Rose, G. Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life (New York: New York Review of Books, 1995).
Rose, G. Paradiso (London: Menard Press, 1999), 22–3.
Hobsbawm, E. Hobsbawm: A Life in History; Radio Interview with Simon Schama (London: BBC Radio 4, Broadcast 9 PM 01/10/2012).
Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘Valéry Proust Museum,’ Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983), 176. Hereafter cited in the text as: VPM.
Horkheimer, M. [1939], ‘The Social Function of Philosophy,’ Trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 270.
Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’ Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1983), 34, 28. Hereafter cited in the text as: CCS. According to Gillian Rose, ‘Adorno’s thought depends fundamentally on the category of reification’ (MS ix). ‘To say that society is “completely reified” is to say that the domination of the exchange process has increased to the point where it controls intuition, behaviour and class formation in such a way that it prevents the formation of any independent and critical consciousness’ (MS 48).
Bernstein, J. M. ‘Introduction,’ The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 6.
Adorno took faits sociaux from Emile Durkheim, according to whom, ‘we do not say that social facts are material things, but they are things just as are material things, although in a different way.’ Durkheim, E. [1895], The Rules of Sociological Method, Trans. W. D. Halls (New York: The Free Press, 1982), 35. Durkheim’s insight was that social facts — (i.e., ‘manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual’ observable in education, ‘legal and moral rules, religious dogmas, financial systems’ (ibid., 52)), ‘which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control’ (ibid., 52) over individuals actions, thoughts and feelings — really ought to be treated in the same way as things in empirical reality. Crucially, Durkheim suggested that social facts possess an unknown, but not unknowable, reality beyond individual consciousness, a priori reasoning and/or subjective intuition — it is in this way that they may claim objectivity. Individuals are initiated into pre-existing social institutions and prevailing habits: laws, languages, and forms of life are imposed upon individuals externally. Conscious introspection, alone, will not suffice for the correct analysis of social facts, which must be studied immanently, as a collective thing. ‘[F]or a social fact to exist, several individuals at the very least must have given rise to some new production. As this synthesis occurs outside each of us (since a plurality of consciousnesses are involved) it has necessarily the effect of crystallising, of instituting outside ourselves, certain modes of action and certain ways of judging which are independent of the particular individual will considered separately’ (ibid., 45).
I am indebted to Simon O’Sullivan for this turn of phrase: O’Sullivan, S. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 40.
Miller, H. [1934], Tropic or Cancer (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 152. ‘[A] rational life in the world, but neither of nor for it.’
Weber, M. [1905], The Protestant Ethic and ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, Trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (London: Penguin, 2002), 105.
See also: John 17: 13–16. ‘As a nondiscursive mode of knowing social reality,’ Lambert Zuidervaart observes, ‘art is in this world but not completely of it.’ Zuidervaart, L. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991), 130. Hereafter cited in the text as: AAT.
Rancière, J. and Hallward, P. ‘Politics and Aesthetics: An Interview,’ Trans. Forbes Morlock, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Volume 8, Number 2, 2003 (Oxford: Taylor & Francis Journals), 206. Hereafter cited in the text as PAI.
Rancière, J. Aesthetics and its Discontents, Trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 32. Hereafter cited in the text as AD.
Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘Art and the arts,’ Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 368. ‘Attempts to give a definitive answer to the priority of art or the arts come mainly from cultural conservatives. For it is in their interest to reduce art to unchanging factors that are openly or covertly based on the past and that can be used to defame the present and the future’ (ibid., 377).
Adorno, T. W. [1961], ‘Vers une musique informelle,’ Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London: Verso, 1998), 269–322. ‘I have coined the French term musique informelle as a small token of gratitude towards the nation for whom the tradition of the avant-garde is synonymous with the courage to produce manifestoes. In contrast to the stuffy aversion to “isms” in art, I believe slogans are as desirable now as they were in Apollinaire’s day’ (ibid., 272). Adorno’s judgement, perhaps, cannot be said to coincide fully with Peter Osborne’s reconstruction, which argues that ‘Adorno maintained a predominantly back-ward looking conception of isms.’
Osborne, P. Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 84.
See: Foster, H., Krauss, R., Bois, Y.-A., Buchloh, B. H. D., and Joselit, D. (Eds), ArtSince 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011 (Second Edition)), 31, 352.
See: Kant, I. [1785], ‘Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals,’ Immanuel Kant: Ethical Philosophy, Trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 44–5. Once upon a time, autonomous art may well have been adequately defined in Kantian terms: art, progressively, salvaged splendid isolation, became autonomous or independent from serving the various purposes of (oppressive) social institutions (i.e., mythic/ cultic superstition, religious doctrine, monarchical rule, political ideology, and economic markets). However, as Kant astutely predicted, ‘traditions which were originally freely chosen eventually become binding.’
Kant, I. [1786], ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ Trans. H. B. Nisbet, Kant: Political Writings, Ed. Hans Reiss, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 248. Hereafter cited in the text as WOT. This misfortune has befallen the autonomy of autonomous art; it has become binding, unfree, and heteronomous. ‘Art’s autonomy’ was, for Adorno (in memory of Kant), both ‘wrested painfully from society as well as socially derived in itself’ (AT 238): hence art’s double character. According to this Adorno, it would be a dumb prerogative to claim a priori status for autonomous art when it is, in fact, historically conditioned, socially derived and imposed, mediated and binding.
Rancière, J. [2011], Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, Trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), x.
‘The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals [Raphael], and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of the division of labour. (…) In any case, with a communist organization of society, there disappears the subordination of the artist to local and national narrowness, which arises entirely from division of labour, and also the subordination of the artist to some definite art, thanks to which he is exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc., the very name of his activity adequately expressing the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on division of labour. In a communist society there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other activities …’ Marx, K. [1846/1932], ‘Artistic Talent under Communism,’ The German Ideology, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 206. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the division of labour is ‘the development of [state or monopoly capitalism] in which the control of the economic apparatus by private groups creates a division between human beings’ (DE 71). Adorno’s understanding of the division of labour was influenced by Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s work in this area.
See: Sohn-Rethel, A. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, Trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London: The Macmillan Press, 1978). ‘There is,’ for Sohn-Rethel, ‘a lack of a theory of intellectual and manual labour, of their historical division and the conditions for their possible reunification. In the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” Marx makes reference to this antithesis that a “higher phase of communist society” becomes possible only “after the enslaving subordination of individuals under division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished.” But before understanding how this antithesis can be removed it is necessary to understand why it arose in the first place. Clearly the division between the labour of head and hand stretches in one form or another throughout the whole history of class society and economic exploitation. It is one of the phenomena of alienation on which exploitation feeds. Nevertheless, it is by no means self-apparent how a ruling class invariably has at its command the specific form of mental labour which it requires’ (ibid., 3–4).
Adorno, T. W. [1942], ‘The Schema of Mass Culture,’ Trans. Nicholas Walker, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 87–8.
Baumgarten cited here in: Hammermeister, K. The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7. According to Hegel, ‘“Aesthetics” means, more precisely, the science of sensation, of feeling (…) [that works of art] were supposed to produce, as, for instance, the feeling of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, and so on. (….) We will therefore let the word “Aesthetics” stand: as a mere name it is a matter of indifference to us, and besides it has meanwhile passed over into common speech. As a name then it may be retained, but the proper expression for our science is Philosophy of Art and, more definitely, Philosophy of Fine Art’ (Ai 1).
Kaufman, R. ‘Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde,’ Critical Inquiry, Volume 27, Number 2, Winter 2001 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 384. Hereafter cited in the text as: NCD.
See also: Kaufman, R. ‘Poetry After “Poetry After Auschwitz,”’ Art and Aesthetics After Adorno (Berkeley: The Regents of the University of California, 2010), 148.
See also: Kaufman, R. ‘Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third “Critique” in Adorno and Jameson,’ Critical Inquiry, Volume 26, Number 4, Summer 2000 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 711. Hereafter cited in the text as: RK.
See: Düttmann, A. G. [2004], Philosophy of Exaggeration, Trans. James Phillips (London: Continuum, 2007).
Adorno, T. W. [1958], ‘The Essay as Form,’ Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Notes to Literature: Volume One, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 4. Adorno’s anti-system comprised of ‘element[s] of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual’ (MM 126).
Bernstein, J. M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 3. Hereafter cited in the text as: FA.
Osborne argues: ‘Contrary to the increasingly common accusation that Aesthetic Theory “was obsolete to begin with because its concept of modern art is too closely welded to artistic tendencies which came to an end with the first half of this century, if not earlier,” Adorno was in fact acutely aware of the aesthetic developments which have more recently come to be understood through the idea of postmodernism.’ Osborne, P. [1989], ‘Adorno and the Metaphysics of Modernism: The Problem of a “Postmodern” Art,’ Theodor W. Adorno: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory; Volume IV, Ed. Simon Jarvis (Oxford: Routledge, 2007), 64. Hereafter cited in the text as: AMM. More recently Osborne has observed that, ‘Aesthetic Theory towers above all other twentieth-century philosophical texts about art.’
Osborne, P. Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 10.
Berman, R. A. Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy or the Frankfurt School (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 94.
Martin, S. [2000], ‘Autonomy and Anti-Art: Adorno’s Concept of Avant-Garde Art,’ Theodor W. Adorno: SAGE Masters of Modern Social Thought: Volume II, Ed. Gerard Delanty (London: SAGE Publications, 2004), 179. Hereafter cited in the text as AAA.
Adorno, T. W. [1960], ‘Music and New Music,’ Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London: Verso, 1998), 262. Hereafter cited in the text as: MNM. ‘[N]ew music constitutes a critique of the old one. Its enemies are well aware of this and this why they raise such a hullabaloo about the undermining of tradition’ (MNM 260). New music is ‘irreconcilable’ with traditional music, ‘yet keeps faith with it; though different from it, a link is preserved. The new music may well be understood as the effort to do justice to all that the sharpened ear of the composer finds unresolved or antinomial in traditional music’ (MNM 262).
Adorno, T. W. [1961], ‘Vers une musique in formelle,’ Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London: Verso, 1998), 282.
‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (…) In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.’ Marx, K. [1852], ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’ Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 329.
‘Hegel taught that wherever something new becomes visible, immediate, striking, authentic, a long process of formation has preceded it and it has now merely thrown off its shell. Only that which has been nourished with the life-blood of the tradition can possibly have the power to confront it authentically. (…) Yet the bond of tradition is hardly equivalent to the simple sequence of events in history; rather, it is subterranean.’ Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘Arnold Schoenberg, 1874–1951,’ Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983), 155. Hereafter cited in the text as: AS.
Kant, I. [1790], Critique of Judgement, Trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 84, § 17.
I am indebted to Simon Jarvis for this paragraph: Jarvis, S. Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 94.
Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘Aldous Huxley and Utopia,’ Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983), 113. Hereafter cited in the text as: AHU.
Boris Groys makes the same category error: ‘Art’s function is rather to show, to make visible the realities that are generally overlooked.’ Groys, B. Going Public, Trans. Steven Linberg and Matthew Partridge (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 69. Yet, for such a critic, motivated by a wish ‘to find more space in [today’s art world] for art functioning as political propaganda’ — ‘as truly political art,’ and ‘not a commodity’ — it is presumably not an error.
Groys, B. Art Power, Trans. Steven Lindberg et al., (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 4, 6–7.
Hammermeister, K. The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180. Hereafter cited in the text as: GAT
Cascardi, A. J. ‘Prolegomena to any Future Aesthetics,’ Art and Aesthetics After Adorno (Berkeley: The Regents of the University of California, 2010), 34.
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Hellings, J. (2014). Anti-Introduction: Paint It Black. In: Adorno and Art. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315717_1
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