Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Band 62. Heft 1

When Adorno and Horkheimer constructed in the early forties the critical concept of culture industry they had in mind mainly movies and radio as its main media. Even television broad- casting was not developed enough at that time to be considered as an important player in the scene of mass culture. Nevertheless the critical aspects of their contribution were so strong and well structured that even today they cannot be discarded in a fair evaluation of such an import- ant phenomenon of contemporary culture. However there have been since the time of Adorno and Horkheimer’s criticism many models of mass culture critique that took into account the evolution of the technological devices, from analogical video systems to the more recent developments of digital media. Since the consideration of the latter does not always rely on the maintenance of the aforementioned critical point of view, a criterion guiding the choice of a theoretical approach could be the way in which the relation between artworks and cultural commodities is conceived. According to this criterion the author chooses as an updated counterpoint to Adorno and Horkheimer’s mass culture critique Vilém Flusser’s theory of what he calls “post-history,” especially in its approach on communication, entertainment and art tout court.

In this paper I start with Adorno’s famous and provocative statement “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, aimed at asking whether art was still possible in the age of genocides. Then, I take into examination Adorno’s concept of commitment in art – which is closely related to these questions - and the meaning itself of the notion of “Auschwitz” in Adorno’s philosophy. Analyzing what Adorno called “true” art (i.e. art provided with a relevant “truth content”) leads to take into consideration what he understood vice-versa as false or untrue art, in particular mass culture and popular music. Adorno would have probably considered as a sort of blasphemy or heresy the idea itself to write and perform pop-rock songs about such subjects as genocide, but I argue that his views rely on some prejudices that negatively condition his philosophy of art and especially of music. The songs on the Armenian genocide written and performed by the heavy metal band System of a Down serve here as a profitable example that may be of help to foster a critical rethinking of some aspects of Adorno’s aesthetics.

By taking seriously an Adornian suggestion, according to which art should be understood as something that “has become what it is”, the main purpose of this essay is to provide an essential reconstruction of Adorno’s aesthetic program. The latter places art within a curve, or constellation, that has the experience of the “shudder” as its anthropological beginning and an ending corresponding to the current context, characterized by the widespread diffusion of the aesthetic dimension (thanks to the “logic” of fashion). Our reconstruction aims to suggest that critical theory is fatally inclined towards this aesthetic constellation as a whole, and therefore it deserves today special attention by virtue of a parallelism with the aestheticizing developments of late-capitalism. As a consequence, Adorno may be considered a (critical) philosopher of globalization, insofar as his theory is aesthetic in a pregnant sense. His aesthetic constellation might in fact encompass the constitutive elements, or at least some essential elements, which are useful to bring the “aesthetic form of life” to the fore.

This lecture-form essay examines various orders of relation between visual art and writing focusing on Adorno’s propositions about art as écriture. Following introductory remarks concerning Adorno’s relation to recent and contemporary Conceptual, activist and multi-media practices and his brief descriptions of the “virtuoso” work of Pablo Picasso, it addresses the relational nexus between art and history mediated by names and titles (looking to the work of the German artist who christened himself Andy Hope 1930), the operations of methexis and Sprachcharakter, realism and abstraction, and ideas, both analagous and discontinuous, in the thinking Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, each convened under the auspices of Adorno’s somewhat ahistorical understanding of écriture. The creatively elastic notion of écriture suggests that the defining quality of art as enigma is best comprehended “from the perspective of language.”

Usually, the ontology of art is executed as an ontology of artworks. This has the consequence that the answer to the question what art is says nothing about why art is valuable. But it is, I argue, necessary to determine the value of art if one wants to say what art is. In order to account for the value of art, I start with the claim that art is a practice of transformation. Thus, I propose to develop the ontology of art as the ontology of a practice of transformation. The practice in question has four elements: first artworks, second interpretive activities through which recipients and producers follow the constellations realized in artworks, third ordinary practices which are reflected through interpretive activities, and fourth practices of art criticism. By way of these four elements art is realized. According to the proposed conception, art is a profoundly unstable practice which challenges human beings and their self-understandings in such a way that they and their self-understandings develop further.

The article examines the subject of ‘primitive’ art in Johannes Volkelt’s System der Ästhetik (1905–1927) against the backdrop of the broad debate on the ethnological refounding of aesthetics around 1900. Unlike contemporaries such as the ethnologist Ernst Grosse, Volkelt tries to prove that the art of ‘primitive peoples’ is an inadequate basis for aesthetics. In doing so, he follows 19th-century idealistic metaphysics of beauty. However, his argumentation against Grosse and others, which contradicts itself in crucial points, attests the challenge of philosophy by ethnology as the leading discipline of aesthetics at the beginning of the 20th century.

Drawing on examples by Gottfried Keller, Gottfried Semper, Walter Benjamin, Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut, the paper pursues the subcutaneous impacts of Goethe’s Faust II in modern aesthetics. Recurring to morphology and the theory of colour, these aesthetics connect Faust with the categories of color and volubility, thus establishing an alternative relation be- tween tradition and modernity.

In The Man Without Content (1970), his first published book, Giorgio Agamben calls for a “destruction of aesthetics.” According to Agamben, aesthetics has to be overcome since it prevents the experience of art as the original and privileged space of our “doing” by splitting art into the passivity of the recipient and the purposeful artistic productivity. This article aims to show that Agamben develops, discussing Nietzsche’s concepts of the artist and Heidegger’s exegesis of Nietzsche, the anthropological paradigm of an interested man who transcends the opposition artist versus recipient and draws the sense of his “doing” from presentification (poie¯sis) and the intensity of the experience of a “being-for-itself” rather than from deliberate production (praxis) and consumption. Currently, however, this paradigm is graspable only negatively by means of the paradox conception of the “potentiality not to” that does not end up in materiality but expresses itself in reflexivity that obtains its force by the creative-formal interruption of the logic of producing.