Realist aesthetics today affirm social surface and block critique

Evidence

The reactionary nature of any realist aesthetic today is inseparable from this commodity character. Tending to reinforce, affirmatively, the phenomenal surface of society, realism dismisses any attempt to penetrate that surface as a romantic endeavour. Every meaning, including critical meaning, which the camera eye imparts to the film would already invalidate the law of the camera and thus violate Benjamin’s taboo, conceived as it was with the explicit purpose of outdoing the provocative Brecht and thereby -this may have been its secret purpose - gaining freedom from him. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 250

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Benjamin’s essay on reproducibility — an essential pair for the reader’s analytical toolkit. — connects to: Aesthetic practices broker between Being and Becoming. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2043