Postmodern art’s rejection of form perpetuates repression without release
Evidence
Without the constraint of form, which dictated the path of sublimation, desublimated desires find themselves set against the same illusory comforts and real obstacles to happiness as precipitated the need for desublimation in the first instance. The culture industry’s response is the production of works, typified in the new architecture, that, through a mimesis of aestheticization, indict the spectator for failing to find gratification where there is none. The release from the rigours of form into the apparent utopian play of differences should have produced a sublime release from the repressions of everyday life under capital and the only illusory dynamic of high culture. Instead, the postmodern sublime (the sublime defeat of the a priori of closed forms), through its aggressive insistence on overcoming the divide between high and low, and integrating art and empirical life, perpetuates the sublime’s violent repression of desire without the concomitant moment of release. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 69
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Art resolves real social contradictions through purely formal means — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1774
Related
- Post-1960s art rejected the institutional hierarchy of materials and objects (similarity 0.79)
- Avant-garde culture thrives where administration has not fully taken hold (similarity 0.79)
- Art reflects its historical situation precisely by refusing the social. (similarity 0.78)