Benjamin and Adorno both located hope in traditional art’s decay and disenchantment

Evidence

Despite various differences, Benjamin and Adorno agreed that disenchantment was unavoidable and even good, and that it was important that it should not be obscured once again by any fresh curse. The opportunities for the present world lay solely in an increasing decay of traditional art. Anything that was incapable of being rescued from this decay and disenchantment was certainly beyond being rescued from what had counted in the past, or even still counted in the present, as being undisenchanted, eternally harmonious, or classically obligatory. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 896

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the ch28 claim that Benjamin reversed his view that hermetic avant-garde art serves revolution, and to Weber’s disenchantment thesis via Lukács. — connects to: Adorno’s negative dialectics located emancipation’s hints in modern art’s distortion — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 380; Benjamin treated mass reproduction’s debasement of art as a salutary rupturing of artificial aura — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 847

Broader Connections

• Benjamin treated mass reproduction’s debasement of art as a salutary rupturing of artificial aura #expands (0.82) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 847
• Adorno’s negative dialectics located emancipation’s hints in modern art’s distortion #expands (0.80) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 380