Adorno exempted autonomous artworks from the universal reification he diagnosed.

Evidence

And just as the analyses, on the negative side, soon ended in reification, alienation, the commodity character and the reflexive individual, on the positive side they soon led to the concept of intellect renouncing authority. In his analysis of works of art, Adorno was ready and willing to grant the characters of fetish and commodity to all and sundry, in the certainty of being able to testify that some of themautonomous ones, of coursehad thoroughly dialecticized their reification. In this way, in spite of having diagnosed a social curse which was all-embracing, he could present them as having escaped the curse. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 234

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A structural contradiction: an all-embracing curse that some artifacts nevertheless escape, which the dialectic is asked to license.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno judged modern art by its refusal to fully separate from what it abolishes — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2720; Adorno argued art’s right to exist returns precisely when it is banned — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 679; Adorno held that art’s decisive level is knowledge inaccessible to bourgeois science. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 242 (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Adorno judged modern art by its refusal to fully separate from what it abolishes — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2720; Adorno argued art’s right to exist returns precisely when it is banned — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 679; Adorno held that art’s decisive level is knowledge inaccessible to bourgeois science. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 242 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Benjamin rejected Adorno’s faith in the benevolence of autonomous art #complicates (0.76)