The Institute’s aesthetic method narrowed to modernism as critical experience

Evidence

When these sentences, which were as true of Lowenthal’s as of Adorno’s work, were written, there was still room at the Institute for both variants of the social-theoretical interpretation of works of art: one centred on aesthetic modernism and the other centred on the bourgeois concept of culture. But it was at this point that Benjamin and Adorno’s position, which made aesthetic modernism into the basis in experience for ideas critical of society, finally took hold at the Institute of Social Research. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 243

Categorization

• XREF: Ties directly to the Frankfurt School’s recurring concern with the culture industry and to Adorno’s later avant-garde exclusivism; contrasts with Lowenthal’s culture-concept approach. — connects to: Institute factions split between aesthetics-based philosophy of history and ideology critique — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 216; Adorno and Benjamin monopolized the Institute’s materialist aesthetics — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 243; Modernist criticism must first submit to modernism’s fascination to have binding force — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 786
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Institute factions split between aesthetics-based philosophy of history and ideology critique — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 216; Adorno and Benjamin monopolized the Institute’s materialist aesthetics — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 243; Modernist criticism must first submit to modernism’s fascination to have binding force — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 786