Horkheimer held that art functions as a form of knowledge unattainable by bourgeois science.
Evidence
His image of art seems to be essentially that of Weimar classicism; I should like to know how he proposes to account for Les Liaisons dangereuses, or Baudelaire, or even for Schoenberg or Kafka. It seems to me that art has a whole levelthe decisive onewhich he completely overlooks: namely, the level of knowledge and discovery, in the sense of what cannot be achieved by bourgeois science. `Roses scattered through life’this sort of thing is really only good enough for the sixth form; and the dialectical counter-motif, that the art of an unpleasant reality provides a contrast with the ideal, is far too flimsy even to come near the decisive results of art. This corresponds to the tremendous naivety with which he accepts certain sensualist aspects of contemporary mass art as positive. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 911
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ and ‘Aesthetic Theory’, which develop art-as-cognition against the idealist aesthetics Horkheimer criticizes here. — connects to: Science and art converge into ideology when their separation is absolutized
- DEEPTHINKING: Encapsulates the Frankfurt revision of aesthetics: art is not pleasure or ideal-contrast but a mode of knowledge bourgeois science structurally cannot produce.