Art and Society in Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
ARTICLES Art and society in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Francisco Fianco Universidade de Passo Fundo Abstract The main theme of this text is the relations between art and society as woven by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, giving special emphasis, among others, to the concepts of disartification of art, truth content, authentic art and dissonance. To fulfill this purpose, we shall use the text of Adorno already mentioned, as well as other texts by the same author on specific issues and the support of scholars such as Rodrigo Duarte, Marc Jimenez and Marcia Tiburi, among others. Keywords: art; society; Aesthetic Theory; Theodor Adorno; contemporary art. Introduction The relations between art and society have always been complex, especially regarding to the dependence or submission of one in relation to the other. If a work of art, like any other cultural production, cannot be separated from the social context in which it occurs, it cannot be summed up to it or instrumentalized by it. Contemporary aesthetic phenomena lead us to perceive, much more explicitly than could ever have been perceived in the long historical trajectory of influence between both these spheres, that when devoid of its intrinsic truth, its autonomy, when subjugated to the social context, art itself loses its character of spontaneous production and becomes ideological propaganda. Of course, it would be naive to pretend that only in the XXth century, with the mass media advent, art would have been limited or influenced, although not consciously and intentionally, by a determined network of values and conceptions, even preconceptions, supported by a specific social, economic and historical configuration, which ended up giving these art works their individuality, enabling them to differentiate from the thousands of other art works already produced.
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