Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

After Adorno: Art, Autonomy, and Critique

After Adorno: Art, Autonomy, and Critique <jats:sec><jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>In conversation with two artist friends recently, both declared that Adorno was a far more serious and productive guide to their practices than any other philosopher or aesthetician. Given their work and histories as artists – one had lived through the period of conceptual art and had been won over briefly to its arguments, the other had emerged out of its ruins — this was a surprise. Like many artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, both had fallen under the sway of Walter Benjamin, and were convinced, in their respective ways, that the dissolution of the category of Art into the forms of modern technology and everyday life was a good thing. Indeed, both artists were proselytisers for photography and its powers of social reference and communality. Discussions of art's autonomy were not on their checklist of priorities. In fact, if autonomy was discussed or thought of at all, it was denounced as a bourgeois category. Autonomy was what Clement Greenberg and modernist painters believed in, and the bane of all materialist art criticism. It was not what serious post-conceptualist artists, armed with the ‘critique of representation’ and theories of the social production of art, should be worrying about.</jats:p> </jats:sec> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Historical Materialism Brill

After Adorno: Art, Autonomy, and Critique

Roberts, John
Historical Materialism , Volume 7 (1): 221 – Jan 1, 2000
Download PDF
19 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/brill/after-adorno-art-autonomy-and-critique-eTOEhNiY00

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 2000 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
1465-4466
eISSN
1569-206X
DOI
10.1163/156920600794750829
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

<jats:sec><jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>In conversation with two artist friends recently, both declared that Adorno was a far more serious and productive guide to their practices than any other philosopher or aesthetician. Given their work and histories as artists – one had lived through the period of conceptual art and had been won over briefly to its arguments, the other had emerged out of its ruins — this was a surprise. Like many artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, both had fallen under the sway of Walter Benjamin, and were convinced, in their respective ways, that the dissolution of the category of Art into the forms of modern technology and everyday life was a good thing. Indeed, both artists were proselytisers for photography and its powers of social reference and communality. Discussions of art's autonomy were not on their checklist of priorities. In fact, if autonomy was discussed or thought of at all, it was denounced as a bourgeois category. Autonomy was what Clement Greenberg and modernist painters believed in, and the bane of all materialist art criticism. It was not what serious post-conceptualist artists, armed with the ‘critique of representation’ and theories of the social production of art, should be worrying about.</jats:p> </jats:sec>

Journal

Historical Materialism – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2000

There are no references for this article.