Preserving conflict in art now functions as romantic deception

Evidence

Only in this consummated conflictlessness does art wholly become one moment of material production and thus turn completely into the lie to which it has always contributed its part in the past. Yet at the same time it here approaches more closely to the truth than those remnants of traditional art that still continue to flourish, to the extent that all preservation of individual conflict in the work of art, and generally even the introduction of social conflict as well, only serves as a romantic deception. It transfigures the world into one in which conflict is still possible rather than revealing it as one in which the omnipotent power of production is beginning ever more obviously to repress such a possibility. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 121

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive inversion — that the conflictless commodity is closer to truth than traditional art that still stages conflict — is dense enough to sit with for days and is the analytical core the reader was promised.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: when does ‘staging conflict’ become the romantic deception, versus genuine resistance? Adorno leaves this as a delicate question at the end.
• XREF: connects to: Society neutralizes art’s subversive force by absorbing its antagonistic content. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 292