An apolitical traditionalist could still revolutionize art

Evidence

It is precisely to this society that they owe that sensuous culture and impatient subtlety which brought them into conflict with Viennese conformism. The boldness of artistic renewal joined hands with proud negligence. In spite of all irony and scepticism, numerous categories of a still firmly integrated social and spiritual order were accepted. These categories provided a not inconsiderable prerequisite for the insubordinate tenderness of this generation. It was necessary, as it were, to be satiated with tradition in order really to be able to negate it and to be able to turn the unique vital force of tradition against ossification and self-satisfaction. It is only where that which was is still strong enough to form the forces within the subject and at the same time to oppose them that the production of that which has not yet been seems possible. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 165 (#expands, via linked claim)

The belief put about by aesthetic theorists that a work of art is to be understood as an object of immediate contemplation, purely on its own terms, is unsound. It is limited not merely by the cultural presuppositions of each work, its ‘language’, which only the initiate can follow. Even where there are no such difficulties, the work of art demands more than that one should merely abandon oneself to it. Anyone wishing to find the Fledermaus beautiful must know that it is the Fledermaus: his mother must have told him that it is not about the winged animal but a fancy-dress costume; he must remember having been told: tomorrow you can go to see the Fledermaus . To be within tradition used to mean: to experience the work of art as something sanctioned, valid: to participate through it in all the reactions of those who had seen it previously. Once this falls away, the work is exposed in its nakedness and fallibility. The plot, from a ritual, becomes idiocy, the music, from a canon of significant figures, flat and stale. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 246 (#expands, via linked claim)

I also believe that at this decisive level of Marxist theory we can be of more service to it the less we appear to be submissively accepting it, and that the aesthetic' can touch on reality in an incomparably deeper and more revolutionary way than class theory would do if it were merely a deus ex machina. — <cite>Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 781</cite> (#corroborates`, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Genuine artistic negation requires being saturated with tradition first — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 165; Art is not graspable by pure contemplation apart from its tradition — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 246; Pre-modern art gained power by serving function rather than claiming autonomy (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Genuine artistic negation requires being saturated with tradition first #expands (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 165
• Art is not graspable by pure contemplation apart from its tradition #expands (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 246
• Aesthetics can transform reality more radically than orthodox class theory. #corroborates (0.74) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 781
• Avant-garde art depends on concrete political conditions, not just aesthetic logic #complicates (0.72) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 243
• Pre-modern art gained power by serving function rather than claiming autonomy #complicates (0.71)