Autonomous high art was founded on excluding the lower classes

Evidence

The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasized itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes—with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality. Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they can use time not spent at the production line just to keep going. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 106

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s Distinction on taste as class stratification, and to the ‘high/low culture’ debate Burns’s work presumably engages. — connects to: High and low art are inseparable torn halves of freedom under capitalism — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 275; Pre-modern art gained power by serving function rather than claiming autonomy; Fifties high art asserted authority by deliberately ignoring mass culture — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 613 (+4 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘the class politics of seriousness’ — how every canon of elevated art was purchased by gatekeeping who gets to be serious at all.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that serious art’s very autonomy is bought through exclusion, making ‘light art’ its bad conscience, is a genuinely paradigm-shifting formulation about the moral structure of aesthetic hierarchy.

Broader Connections

• High and low art are inseparable torn halves of freedom under capitalism #expands (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 275
• Art’s autonomy paradoxically depends on the very commodity economy it negates #complicates (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 118
• Pre-modern art gained power by serving function rather than claiming autonomy #contradicts (0.80)
• Art’s autonomy internalizes the very social domination it claims to escape #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 296
• Fifties high art asserted authority by deliberately ignoring mass culture #exemplifies (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 613
• The avant-garde attacked art’s institutional status, not merely artistic styles #expands (0.78) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 233
• The high-low art split itself, not either pole, reveals truth about society #expands (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 20