Politics and the Enigma of Art: The Meaning of Modernism for Adorno

Abstract

David Ferris (University of Colorado-Boulder) explores Theodor Adorno's categorical rethinking of the legitimacy of art in his late Aesthetic Theory. Writing at a point when the modernity of Modernism seems to have faded, Adorno imagines an art that will not sever the preconditions of its existence and a mode of aesthetic reflection that aims to chart the conflicted, negative relationship of art to a past it appears to have dismissed. Adorno's resolutely negative mode of cognition, Ferris argues, may be the only strategy for preserving the possibility of aesthetics and/as politics at the exact moment when, in an emphatically formalist turn, art seems to have turned defiantly away from such a model.