30 Consecutive Days of Blogging (XVI)

5 quotations from Chapter 11 of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: **************************************************************************************

"Forms go on exercising theor sway over the subject until a cleavage opens between them & the consistency of the particular work. It is then that the subject explodes them, for the sake of consistency & because the objective situation demands it. The individual work that simply subordinates itself to a genre does not do justice to it. It is more fruitful if there is conflict between them. Historically, genre has gone through several phases: from legitimation (of old genres) to creation (of new genres) to destruction (of genres per se)" (288).

"Conventional genres continued to be alluring even though they had lost their power. This was the price that had to be paid for progress. Conventional genres are like after-images of authority--a headache for art more than anything else. Art cannot take them seriously...Having lost their original purpose, these conventions later functioned as masks, which in turn are forebears of art, for all art in its rigidity & objectification is reminiscent of masks" (290-1).

"Style-copying is specifically bourgeois in that it promises freedom while simultaneously curtailing it. Everything is supposed to be available to the grasp of the bourgeois. But in grasping it, he stoops to copying" (294).

"The possibility of creating authentic art freely on one's own is...unreal because the individual is under the sway of the market to which he must adapt...Capital mobilizes what seem to it irrational moments of art, thereby destroying them. The spell of society maims aesthetic rationality & irrationality alike" (294).

"What lends significance to thoughts about art in the so-called technological age, characterized as it is both by a specific level of productive forces & by the surrounding relations of production, is not only the question of whether art keeps abreast of the latest technical developments but also the problem of how constitutive modes of experience change in response to different technologies & how these changes are reflected in works of art" (311).