Pre-modern art gained power by serving function rather than claiming autonomy

Evidence

At one time the line of demarcation between reality and culture was neither so sharp nor so deep as it now is. Works of art did not, for example, reflect upon their own autonomy and upon the formal law unique to each of them; rather they had their place within given contexts, within which they fulfilled a function, no matter how immediate it was. They did not yet assert their existence as works of art to the degree which was later to seem almost a matter of course; it was precisely this factor from which the fullness and comprehensiveness of their success - indeed their very artistic power - benefited. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 158

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The claim that inauthentic autonomy weakens art parallels Adorno’s later argument that the culture industry produces pseudo-individuation — the current chapter’s historical baseline for that argument.

Related

• Art’s autonomy internalizes the very social domination it claims to escape (similarity 0.85)
• Art’s autonomy paradoxically depends on the very commodity economy it negates (similarity 0.83)
• Modernist art’s critical distance was purchased at the price of market subsumption. (similarity 0.82)
• Autonomous art is itself a product of market commercialization, not its opposite. (similarity 0.82)
• Adorno’s modernism was historically grounded, not prescriptively essentialist. (similarity 0.81)
• Adorno’s modernism was historicist, not prescriptive about art’s future (similarity 0.80)
• Autonomous art is inherently dialectical, blending magic with freedom rather than being reactionary (similarity 0.80)
• Art’s impractical existence is itself a protest against commodification (similarity 0.79)
• Culture’s promise of happiness is equivocal because it exists only where freedom does not (similarity 0.79)
• Art loses its critical friction when it becomes purely self-referential. (similarity 0.79)
• Poptimism’s leveling of art and commerce destroyed art’s autonomy (similarity 0.79)
• For Adorno, artistic autonomy and commodity fetishism are mutually constitutive, not opposites. (similarity 0.78)