Adorno valued avant-garde provocation because authentic despair in art foreshadows reality’s collapse.

Evidence

What took precedence for him was the fact that the works and opinions of the avant-garde were able to cause unrest and make art a form of provocation, independently of trends and causes. Avant-garde art was presumably no more important to him than a free society; but his passion for the new music, and a critical glance at social reality, made the progress of art seem the more obvious choice in his view. If art first gave authentic expression to the latest occasions for despair that were occurring in realityhe may finally have thoughtthen that reality could not long persist. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 552

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School material on culture industry and the claim that authentic art holds a negative relation to social reality. — connects to: Adorno held that art anticipating despair moves reality toward change — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2236; Adorno saw authenticity as irrationality used as a control mechanism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2515; Adorno’s negative dialectics located emancipation’s hints in modern art’s distortion — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 380 (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Is this inference about Adorno’s motive a documented view or the biographer’s reconstruction? Worth checking against Adorno’s own writings on engaged art.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Adorno held that art anticipating despair moves reality toward change — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2236; Adorno saw authenticity as irrationality used as a control mechanism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2515; Adorno’s negative dialectics located emancipation’s hints in modern art’s distortion — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 380 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno held that art anticipating despair moves reality toward change #corroborates (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2236
• Despairing art engages the world only to confirm its own bleak hypothesis #complicates (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1066
• Adorno’s paradoxes collapse into sentimentality through their reliance on a cultured nature #complicates (0.76) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 329