Dissonance preserves the promise of happiness that pleasant art has falsified.

Evidence

The seductive power of the charm survives only where the forces of denial are strongest: in the dissonance which rejects belief in the illusion of the existing harmony. The concept of the ascetic is itself dialectical in music. If asceticism once struck down the claims of the aesthetic in a reactionary way, it has today become the sign of an advanced art: not, to be sure, by an archaicizing parsimony of means in which deficiency and poverty are manifested, but by the strict exclusion of all culinary delights which seek to be consumed immediately for their own sake, as if in art the sensory were not the bearer of something intellectual which only shows itself in the whole rather than in isolated topical moments. Art records negatively just that possibility of happiness which the only partially positive anticipation of happiness ruinously confronts today. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 70

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the dialectical concept of asceticism in music and the negative function of art — a core analytical move the reader must reproduce when applying Adorno to post-1969 culture.
• XREF: connects to: Art promises happiness only at the cost of illusoriness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2742