Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature)
by Theodor W. Adorno
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Book Summary Information
Author: Theodor W. AdornoEditor: Robert Hullot-Kentor
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1998-12
ISBN: 0816618003
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Book Reviews of Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature)
Book Review: The definite book of modernist aesthetics
Summary: 5 Stars
Adorno is not famous for his writing style. His prose is dense, and sometimes impenetrable for the English reader. Yet, I think Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is one of the greatest books of XX century philosophy along with Heidegger's "Being and Time", and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I think there are three levels of reflection in this book. The first is that AT is a sociology of art. Adorno traces the social and economic conditions of how modern art becomes to being. Industrialization and modernization have a great impact on aesthetics because perception and reality are fundamentally altered. Adorno makes the case that the destruction of nature by industry makes art to find its reality elsewhere and, hence, it becomes abstract. Art does not want to imitate nature anymore since nature is already destroyed. It escapes to the realm of idea(l)s in order to critique the current state of being. The critical nature of modern art makes for the second level of Adorno's reading which is the aesthetic. Aesthetics in modernism becomes an instrument of social critique. Before, in the time of Kant and the idealists, aesthetic was the study of beauty and artistic genius. Now, according to Adorno, it becomes the study of social disintegration in which the artist is just the "unfortunate" medium to express it. Yet, Adorno is not a complete pessimist. (Although his arrogance and snobbery concerning "lower" popular art is of the worst kind. His favorite artists are the European ultra-elite: Mahler, Kafka, Schonberg). He sees in aesthetic reflection a tool for utopian transformation. This is the third level of reading AT -the philosophical or utopian. Modern art, because it critiques this world for the sake of a better one, is also philosophy. Since philosophy was the discipline that established how the real and ideal are separated, modern art also shows this gap, and treats beauty as a poor substitute for happiness. Beauty, once idealized by the elite, becomes a sign of the powerlessness of art to transform the world. This impotence, still, is a sign of art's utopian power. This kind of paradoxical reasoning is typical of Adorno, and it is loaded with theological significance. Art promises something that cannot be delivered, but who delivers then?
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