Art’s enigma lies in its truth content and the unanswerable claim to meaning

Evidence

Ultimately, works of art are enigmatic not in their composition, but in their truth content. The ever-recurring question with which any work of art releases one who has passed through itWhat does it all mean?'becomes a But is it true?’, a question that seeks the absolute. Every work of art reacts to this question by relinquishing discursive responses. The taboo on the answer is the last information released by discursive thought. In a form of mimetic resistance to this taboo, art tries to give the answer, but since it must remain impartial, it fails to do so; and it therefore becomes as enigmatic as the horrors of the primitive world, which have not disappeared, but merely transformed themselves. All art remains a seismogram of these horrors … The external shape in which this enigmatic quality can be conceived is the question of whether or not meaning itself exists. For there is no work of art that lacks a context, even if this varies to the extent of turning into its opposite. Through the objectivity of its structure, however, the context lays claim to the objectivity of meaning as such. Not only can this claim not be justified, it is even contradicted by experience. The enigmatic quality gazes forth from each work of art in a different fashion, but as if the answer, like that of the sphinx, were always the sameeven if only in being different, rather than in the unity that the enigma, perhaps deceptively, promises. Whether this promise is deceptive or not: that is the enigma. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2741

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Adorno’s climactic account of artistic enigma as the unanswerable claim to meaning — ‘the taboo on the answer is the last information released by discursive thought’ is a genuinely seismic formulation.
• XREF: connects to: Art’s continued existence testifies to a paradox that grounds all beauty; For Adorno, solving a riddle destroys rather than reveals its meaning — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 197

Broader Connections

• For Adorno, solving a riddle destroys rather than reveals its meaning #expands (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 197
• Art’s continued existence testifies to a paradox that grounds all beauty #expands (0.82)