Adorno pointed out that popular art loses its essence through commercialization and conceals the contradictions of modern society. He argued that the standardization of art equates individual appreciation with individuality, and that art should resist this equating.
Adorno pointed out that mass art produced by the culture industry has not only lost its essence by becoming a commodity for profit maximization, but also conceals the contradictions and absurdities of modern society. In Adorno’s view, popular art is nothing more than a commodity that is standardized from its composition to its expression. He believes that the standardization of popular art leads to the standardization of individual appreciation, and individuality becomes indistinguishable from that of other individuals. Especially in a capitalist society that tries to reduce everything to the exchange value of commodities, popular art acts as a mechanism to reduce even individual identity to a commodity.
Adorno defines the property of unifying different value systems into a single value system as sameness, and the property of refusing to be reduced to a single value system as dissimilarity, and argues that art should have a dissimilarity that refuses this reduction. That is why art should refuse to be the beautiful commodity that the public wants, and should be ugly and unpleasant for its own sake. For him, art should allow the viewer to experience the essence of the world as the artist sees it. Art should be a medium for experiencing the absurdity of modern society by appearing as a formless, unstructured form that refuses to be identified.
Adorno appreciates that avant-garde art, such as Schoenberg’s music, resists identification in its own right, but does not directly express resistance or enlightenment. This is because he sees inherent in any direct expression of resistance or enlightenment a violent intention to homogenize the non-identical. Just as Schoenberg’s music, full of dissonance, offended his listeners, art must resist the violence of homogenization by making them experience the inhomogeneity it reveals.
For Adorno, art is a social product, and so aesthetics exists to read the painful state of society precipitated in the work. He proposed avant-garde art, in which non-identification itself is an attribute, as a desirable form for art to pursue. Adorno’s aesthetics is positive in that he sought the autonomy of art through the relationship between art and society. This is because he believes that art should be both social and detached from society to face the nature of society. His aesthetic provides a critical perspective on existing art. For example, if we read Cézanne’s painting of an apple through the lens of Adorno’s aesthetics, we would see it as a representation of the nature of society, a “beautiful fiction” from which the artist is vantage point.
However, Cézanne’s painting could be a mimesis, a representation of the artist’s subjective impressions in colors and geometric shapes such as red and gray. Mimesis is the reproduction of the subject’s view of the world, or in other words, the realization of the sensible from the insensible. In other words, Cézanne’s work is not a specific apple, but a representation of the world as captured by the artist’s gaze: the life force of nature, the life of the farmer, and the artist’s thoughts as he contemplates it.
Adorno believes that art should make the viewer experience the essence of the world as captured by the artist, but by limiting this aesthetic experience to the absurdities of contemporary society, he limits true art to the experience of the atypicality of form itself as a sensory object. In other words, Adorno’s aesthetics denies the mimesis of subjective representation.
Adorno’s aesthetics, on the other hand, shrinks the realm of art to an extreme degree: although he himself criticizes the violence of identification, he attempts to identify art in terms of avant-garde art, claiming that only the avant-garde art he pursues is true art. In particular, this deprives the viewer of the opportunity to discover the value of various arts in reality. Aesthetic value can be found in art that is not avant-garde, as Benjamin points out that it is possible to discover a new artistic spirit even in a photograph that was taken by mistake and lacks any subjectivity of the artist. In addition, even popular art that is aligned with the logic of capital can perform a critical function for society, just as popular music can convey a message of social resistance.
Adorno’s theories need to be understood in the context of his time. As a thinker active during the rapid expansion of capitalism in the early 20th century, he witnessed the development of mass media and the subsequent expansion of the cultural industry. Popular art was being mass-produced using new technologies, which enabled forms of cultural consumption like never before. Adorno saw this change as the commercialization and standardization of art, which he believed hindered the public’s ability to think critically.
Today, however, public art comes in many forms, and the development of digital technology has made it possible for anyone to participate in artistic creation. The internet and social media have made it easier for individual voices to be heard, creating new art forms that are different from traditional commercial art. These changes have sparked debate about whether Adorno’s theories are still relevant in the modern world.
While Adorno’s critical theory still offers important insights today, it is limited in its ability to explain the diversity and complexity of contemporary art. While critical perspectives based on his theories remain valid, we need to explore new art theories and approaches that reflect the changes in contemporary society and technological advances. It is important to recognize that popular art can be distorted by the logic of capital, but at the same time it can also be used as a tool of social resistance and change.
