Adorno held that classicist theory fails to capture actual bourgeois art practice

Evidence

But it really is, as you write, `too broad’ and, precisely in this, too idealistic. This can also be seen, for example, in the fact that classicist aesthetics is assumed automatically, without the question even being raised of whether the way it was practiced by its greatest representativesI am thinking of Goethe, or Beethoven . . .corresponds to Herder’s Reflections [on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind], Kant’s Critique of Judgement or Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, and whether, precisely in art, the bourgeois rupture between theory and practice is not of enormous significance, i.e whether classicist aesthetics does not deny what actually happens in Elective Affinities or in the second part of Faust. The fact that Marcuse presumes that these are identical means that he succumbs to the idealist delusion; admittedly, it is then easy for him to demystify it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 913

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Adorno’s charge that treating aesthetic theory and artistic practice as identical is itself the idealist delusion — a subtle, dense argument about the bourgeois rupture between theory and practice being performed within art itself, worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno rejected the immediate mapping of art content onto economic social history — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 878

Broader Connections

• Adorno rejected the immediate mapping of art content onto economic social history #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 878