The Institut rejected individual-expression views of art as historically transcendental

Evidence

Equally foreign to the Institut’s thinking was the evaluation of artistic phenomena as merely expressions of individual creativity. Horkheimer, it will be recalled, wrote his Habilitationsschrift on Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Almost two decades later, he returned to Kant’s argument that an element of common humanity, of shared hope for the potential of mankind, informed every aesthetic act. The supra-individual subject was not, however, abstractly transcendental, as Kant had believed, but was historical instead. The artistic subject was in a sense social as well as individual. Works of art thus expressed objective social tendencies unintended by their creators. The artist’s alleged creative freedom was in some ways illusory. “Like artists’ lives,” Adorno wrote in his essay on Valery and Proust, “their works appear ‘free’ only when seen from the outside. The work is neither a reflection of the soul nor the embodiment of a Platonic Idea. It is not pure Being but rather a ‘force-field’ between subject and object.” 25 Thus, to the Frankfurt School, the aesthetic rationale of expressionism, which was particularly popular in the Germany of their youth, was ultimately false. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 544

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Horkheimer’s Habilitationsschrift on Kant to the later Institute position, a through-line the reader can follow in tracking the tradition. — connects to: Post-1960s art rejected the institutional hierarchy of materials and objects — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2912; Art is not graspable by pure contemplation apart from its tradition — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 246; Art has no unitary essence or unfolding logic — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 247 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Post-1960s art rejected the institutional hierarchy of materials and objects #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2912
• Art has no unitary essence or unfolding logic #expands (0.82) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 247
• Art is not graspable by pure contemplation apart from its tradition #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 246
• Critics functioned as status-granting institutions that countered commercial valuation of art #expands (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 857