Perfect recorded-style performance destroys a work by eliminating its tensions

Evidence

The new fetish is the flawlessly functioning, metallically brilliant apparatus as such, in which all the cogwheels mesh so perfectly that not the slightest hole remains open for the meaning of the whole. Perfect, immaculate performance in the latest style preserves the work at the price of its definitive reification. It presents it as already complete from the very first note. The performance sounds like its own phonograph record. The dynamic is so predetermined that there are no longer any tensions at all. The contradictions of the music material are so inexorably resolved in the moment of sound that it never arrives at the synthesis, the self-production of the work, which reveals the meaning of every Beethoven symphony. What is the point of the symphonic effort when the material on which that effort was to be tested has already been ground up? The protective fixation of the works leads to its destruction, for its unity is realized in precisely that spontaneity which is sacrificed to the fixation. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 89

Categorization

• XREF: This is the direct engine to run against modern culture: flawless remasters, AI-upscaled classics, ‘definitive’ streaming versions of old films that scrub away grain and artifacts. Same reification mechanism Adorno describes, now at industrial scale.
• SEED: An essay applying ‘the barbarism of perfection’ to the current mania for restoring and remastering old media — 4K upscales, Peter Jackson’s Get Back, Criterion ‘perfect’ transfers — asking where fidelity-enhancement crosses into erasing the work’s own temporality.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a work’s meaning resides in its own self-production in the moment of listening rather than in the finished object is dense and genuinely paradigm-shifting for anyone curating or consuming media.