Adorno

Lauren DiCoccio

Marco Brambilla

Adorno takes his cue from Benjamin. Although there is little mention of mechanically reproduced art, Adorno clearly takes inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Adorno runs with Benjamin’s closing remark: “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responded by politicizing art” (444). Adorno expands upon the difference between aestheticizing politics and politicizing aesthetics.

Benjamin argued that art in the contemporary age has been commoditized, thus destroying the aura and the power of art. Adorno agrees, “Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity” (226).  Art that is easily absorbed ceases to function as art. Art absorbs us, and we absorb commodities. Art that does not force us to meet its challenge is not art at all.

“Whoever experiences [erlebt] artworks by referring them to himself, does not experience them; what passes for experience [Erlebnis] is a palmed-off cultural surrogate” (246).

Art possesses a dipartite nature, which Adorno refers to as the combination of, “autonomous structures and social phenomena” (248).  Art is dependent upon society as a means of grounding its aura, providing source material and an audience. But it is vital that art never caters to the audience: “art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art” (225).  Art is social in its essence, but must function as a being-for-itself. For if art possesses in perceivable function, it becomes a commodity. The uselessness of art is “the strongest defense of art against its bourgeois functionalization” (227). In fact, according to Adorno, “the necessity of art…is its nonnecessity” (251).

The social relevance of the autonomous artwork is the key to the continuation of great art. It is the politicizing of aesthetics. This implies that the art cannot be created with any predetermined socially universal message. If it was, art would be politics in an aesthetic disguise. “The immanence of society in the artwork is the essential social relation of art, not the immanence of art in society” (232). Art is only important and relevant to us as a society if it contains a societal truth at its center, the external placement of art within society is not one of its essential characteristics.

It is obvious in looking at our world today that there are examples of both aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics. Fine art continues to get stranger to us in an ever-intensifying effort to challenge our oversaturated media-hungry minds. Some works of art intend to jar us to this realization by directly referencing the problem. Consumerism, in particular, is a popular topic. Artist Marco Brambilla uses maximalist video collages to create his pieces. A common theme in these collages seems to be the mechanization of man: the use of him and his art as a mere cog in a larger project. is reflective Benjamin’s talk of fascism through a mass culture. Adorno echoes Benjamin’s in this respect. Brambilla seems to agree with Adorno and Benjamin while striving to counteract the effects of the our “proletariazation.” Lauren DiCoccio tackles our mass-culture as evidence in consumerism by handmaking common commodities.

We can also seem the aestheticizing of politics in a very literal sense. The design of presidential campaigns is increasingly important to us. Obama posters by Shepard Fairey, a prominent graffiti artist, lent his 2008 campaign a sort of street cred. That the posters were not commissioned and that Fairey was eventually sued for plagiarizing an image of Barack Obama only added to the impression that he was the candidate of the man on the street. On the other hand, Romney’s 2012 campaign logo was criticized on the internet for resembling Aquafresh toothpaste. 

It seems that there is a definite value difference between politicized aesthetics and aestheticized politics. However, I think Adorno is right in shying away from Benjamin’s claim that the two cling to two very different political systems. I think that there is far more gray area than Benjamin implies, and that Adorno is right to mention poltical systems only obliquely.