Pushing bourgeois individualist art to its logical end dissolves the creative personality it presupposed.
Evidence
Art attempts to imitate an expression that would not involve any intrusion from human intention. Human intention is merely its vehicle. The more perfect the work of art, the more intentions drop away from it. Mediately, nature is the truth content of art, but immediately it produces its opposite. If the language of nature is silent, art strives to bring what is silent to speak. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2735 (
#expands, via linked claim)
When we turn from such a work to the literature of the industrial era, everything changes. The elements of the work begin to flee their human center: a kind of dissolution of the human sets in, a kind of centrifugal dispersal in which paths lead out at every point into the contingent, into brute fact and matter, into the not-human. Even those most basic components of the story, the characters themselves, become problematical: now they have personalities, and the choice of personality traits, the portrayal of the hero as dreamy and idealistic rather than choleric and cynical, demands organic justification within the work itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 346 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
The fact that (works of art) seem to be growing more indifferent cannot be explained merely by a decrease in their social effectiveness. There is some evidence that the works lose their coefficient of friction, an element essential to them, when they turn towards their own pure immanence: that they are also becoming more indifferent in themselves. The fact that radically abstract paintings can be hung in official reception rooms without causing offence does not, however, justify any restoration of a representationalism that is pleasant a priori, even if Che Guevara is selected for the purposes of reconciliation with the object. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2731 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Art loses its critical friction when it becomes purely self-referential. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2731; Art’s perfection increases as human intention drops away from it — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2735; Industrial-era art loses its concrete human center as elements disperse into contingency. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 346
Broader Connections
- Art’s perfection increases as human intention drops away from it
#expands(0.90) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2735 - Art loses its critical friction when it becomes purely self-referential.
#expands(0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2731 - Industrial-era art loses its concrete human center as elements disperse into contingency.
#corroborates(0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 346