30 Consecutive Days of Blogging (XIV)

INCOMPLETE. Some intersting quotations from Chapter 10 of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: **************************************************************************************

"The experience of art is adequate when it is live...it asserts that aesthetic experience is live in terms of its object, namely at the moment when art works themselves are brought to life under the gaze of aesthetic experience" (252).

"As art begins to speak, it becomes a thing in motion. The unity of meaning, if this term is at all legitimate in relation to an artefact, is not static but processual. It is the enactment of antagonisms inherent in every work" (252).

"Art works synthesize diverse, incompatible elements" (253).

"All works of art, including affirmative ones, are ipso facto polemical. The very notion of a conservative work of art is somehow absurd. By emphatically severing ties with the empirical world, art in an unconscious way expresses its desire to change the world" (253).

"Above all, the work of art is processual in so far as it is a realtion between a whole & its parts. In other words, this relation itself is a process of becoming. The work of art is not a totality in the sense of a structure integrating the parts: once objetified, the work keeps on producing itself in response to the tendencies at work in it" (255).

"Works of art are not fixed once & for all, but are in flux. The inherent temporality also affects the relation between whole & parts, a relation which changes over time & is potentially subject to being discontinued entirely. If works of art have a historical existence owing to their processual quality, they must also be able to persih" (255-6).

"In relation to one another, art works are hermetically closed off & blind, yet able in their isolation to represent the outside world" (257).

"History is constitutive of works of art. Authentic ones give themselves over completely to the material substance of their historical period, rejecting the pretence of timelessness. Unbeknown to themselves, they represent the historiography of their times" (261).

"Works of art are more susceptible to genuine experience the more their historical substance coincides with that of the subject of that experience" (262).

"The most extreme shocks & gestures of estrangement emanating from modern art...are closer to us than past art which seems close because of its historical reification" (262).

"When something becomes too familiar it stops making sense. What is immediately accessible is bound to be lifeless as well. The accessiblity of past art spells its doom" (262).

"The consumer of art tends to be exceeedingly hostile to any attempt to rob him of what he takes to be his possession, not realizing that he himself is his own robber because art vanishes when it is turned into a possession. Estrangement fromthe world is a moments of art. If one perceives art as anything other than strange, one does not perceive it at all" (262-3).