Adorno’s modernism was historicist, not prescriptive about art’s future

Evidence

Nor was Adorno an essentialist who believed that the notion of advanced artistic materials represented an ahistorical logic of the different arts. The very idea of advanced artistic materials was a consequence of the exclusion from empirical reality of specific categorical possibilities of practice. Adorno’s primary concern was not with the future of art but with salvaging those elements most under threat from enlightened reason: sensuous particularity, rational ends, a substantial notion of individuality, and authentic happiness. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 59

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘advanced artistic materials’ means in Adorno — a historically contingent category, not an ahistorical essence.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno treated artistic modernism as anticipating a free society — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2229; Adorno could not specify criteria distinguishing resigned from oppositional art. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2195

Related

• Adorno’s modernism was historically grounded, not prescriptively essentialist. (similarity 0.95)
• Adorno treated artistic modernism as anticipating a free society (similarity 0.87)
• Adorno could not specify criteria distinguishing resigned from oppositional art. (similarity 0.83)
• Adorno judged modern art by its refusal to fully separate from what it abolishes (similarity 0.83)
• Adorno rejected the immediate mapping of art content onto economic social history (similarity 0.82)
• Modern art’s very production is driven by a nominalist imperative (similarity 0.82)
• Adorno held that art anticipating despair moves reality toward change (similarity 0.82)
• Adorno held that classicist theory fails to capture actual bourgeois art practice (similarity 0.81)
• Modernist art’s critical distance was purchased at the price of market subsumption. (similarity 0.81)
• Adorno linked Beckett’s greatness to the late style of earlier masters (similarity 0.81)
• Adorno believed a knowledge of art made the turn to social theory necessary. (similarity 0.80)
• Adorno located society’s crucial problems within autonomous art as a model of salvation (similarity 0.80)
• Adorno regarded Beckett and Celan as heirs of heroic modernism, not contemporaries of it. (similarity 0.80)
• Adorno held that purified art converges with nature rather than alienating from it. (similarity 0.80)
• Adorno read late works as climaxes across art history (similarity 0.80)