Modern art’s very production is driven by a nominalist imperative

Evidence

Adorno has for one already explored the ways in which modern art centrally faces a logic of nominalism as its situation and its dilemma; he borrowed the word from Croce, who used it largely to discredit the kinds of genre thinking at work in the art appreciation of his own day, generalities and generic classifications he felt to be inconsistent with the experience of the individual work of art. In Adorno, nominalism enters the very production of the modern work as a destiny; and his formal diagnosis is also implicit in his work on the history of modern philosophical concepts, which are now fatally driven back from the universalizing possibilities of traditional philosophy (about which he is not particularly nostalgic). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 548

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to the reader’s push on ‘style as the economy’s way of appearing’ — nominalism as an economic/cultural imperative bearing down on aesthetic production. — connects to: Formalist language, emptied of content, gives rise to nominalism as bourgeois thought — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 66; Modern art’s drive came from Kant’s gap between the conceivable and presentable — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 74