Adorno and practically useless art, or autonomy instead of avant-garde

Abstract

_{Adorno’s aesthetic theory allows us to treat him as an anti-theorist of the avant-garde. We can find in his work many accurate observations grasping the essence of the changes that were introduced by this artistic formation. Adorno himself used the term “avant-garde” in a slightly different meaning – as denoting artistic production going against the traditional aesthetic tastes, but also resistance to commercialization and reification. In the context of Adorno’s whole philosophy such resistance is illusory. The mechanisms governing the sphere of culture are total and efficiently pacify any aesthetic rebellions. Therefore, it is not in the formal experiments that Adorno saw the rebellion of art against the existing system. According to the German philosopher, the critical function of art – its main vocation – is realized in the antithetic attitude to reality and is due to the so-called “ideal of transformation”. And those are only conditioned by the autonomy of art. In the present paper I discuss the points in Adorno’s aesthetic theory at which he shows art as autonomous.}