Adorno Why Is the New Art So Hard to Understand

The to a higher place is the title of a marvelous short lecture delivered by Theodor Adorno in 1931 (published in English for the first time in 2001 in Richard Leppert's (ed.) huge collection of all of Adorno's writings on music). Its striking how much is packed into this short piece. It is also very refreshing to read someone as erudite (and also, not accidentally, very challenging to read) as Adorno trying to respond this seemingly straight-forrard question before a very wide audience. What's interesting is that Adorno's talk is not ostensibly addressed to philosophers, theorists, academics or artists. Rather, he addresses the general public who is confronted past artworks. Think of the 'average' person wandering through a museum.

The first affair he does is delimit the scope of the talk to a specific sense of the question ('why is the new fine art so hard to sympathize?'). After all, what is "the new art' and what does he mean by 'hard to sympathize?'. Adorno has in mind art that is specifically modernistic in the "sense that information technology is accompanied past the shock of its strangeness and enigmatic course, the shock that is actually the basis of all the talk about its existence hard to understand."

Any we might say virtually 13 th and fourteen th century European painting, for example, the content and formal characteristics of such works are, more or less, readily intelligible to a mod Western audience. A directly-forward representational painting, or even amend a painting trying to achieve perfect mimesis , would hardly strike the average viewer every bit shocking, strange, enigmatic or confusing.
We wouldn't expect whatsoever person on the street to say of a painting past Michelangelo or fifty-fifty Monet, for example, 'that's not fine art'. In contrast, it would not exist difficult to imagine this same 'boilerplate' person on the street standing before a Pollock, or a Richter, or Rothko, Stella, etc. in a dislocated (or, perhaps indignant and resentful) way, perhaps fifty-fifty wondering whether at that place is anything of value about such works (if they are even to be considered 'art' in any meaningful sense at all). I'm reminded of numerous times when I stood before works of this sort in a state of confusion: what is this well-nigh? what is going on hither?
In other words, "older art", as Adorno points out, "possesses a certain immediacy of effect that makes it understandable, while this immediacy is no longer nowadays in the new art, and hence some kind of helping operations are required in order to penetrate its center."

For Adorno , this experience of difficulty derives from the fact that the production of art, creative cloth, the demands and tasks that confront the artists as they work, etc. have all go divorced from consumption. That is, artistic production has been divorced from "the presumptions, claims and possibilities of comprehension that the reader, viewer or listener brings to the works of art." Another way to put this would be to point out that artistic product in modernistic capitalist club (in contrast to other eras in which artistic product was explicitly embedded in other life-activities), fine art is removed from all immediate use and thus from all firsthand comprehensibility. Afterward all, "fine art for art'due south sake" is not a call to make art conform to the demands of daily life activities (e.thousand. to strength works of art, on pain of dismissal as 'useless', to have some firsthand purpose such as getting stains out of clothing).

Hostility to 'mod' works of art (exist they paintings, music, etc.) takes many forms, but one mutual reaction I've observed is the impulse to point to the past equally an era (before things took a 'wrong turn') which must be recovered. I am reminded here of certain types of conservatory-pupil musicians, totally hostile to Webern or Berg, who might instead recommend a recovery of tonality or a return to the 'beautiful' music of before (Romantic, in particular) periods. Schoenberg's music is 'bad', for example, to the extent that "the chords, which are built in many layers and do not have a given function inside a given cardinal, cannot exist repeated every bit arbitrarily as the one-time ones, or considering the rhythms cannot exist combined into regular, symmetrical forms".

Another manner to characterize this attitude would be to posit the history of Western music as a continuous, internally coherent progression which made sense until the isolated aberration of artists associated with 'modernism'.

Adorno points out, however, that the relevant consideration hither is not the psyche of modern artists (equally deviant individuals, or equally having orchestrated this 'incorrect turn' into smug incomprehensibility), simply rather the socio -economic state of affairs of contemporary society itself. The difficult, challenging grapheme of mod artworks, for Adorno , is "the result of a socio -economic development that transforms all goods into consumer goods, makes them abstractly exchangeable, and has therefore torn them asunder from the immediacy of use." In modernistic art'due south struggle to maintain its own autonomy from the demands of nine:00-5:00, from the banality of mass markets, it has generally endeavored to abjure the dictates of 'employ' altogether. In earlier societies, art was jump upwardly with ceremonial and religious functions; this is no longer the instance in gimmicky culture. Whereas near all consumer products (themselves a strange development: 'products made for the purpose of consumption') retain some clue of employ-value, art is purportedly infrequent precisely to the extent that denounces all considerations of 'utilize' in this sense.

Why is modern fine art alienated from use? Adorno rightly points out that to "describe how this breach came about would be nothing less than to sketch the history of our gild". But what is it well-nigh contemporary society, then, that accounts for this divestment from employ and this struggle to preserve fine art's particularity? As suggested earlier, For Adorno it has to do with the separation of product from consumption. Production tends to behave in a way that expresses the tensions and contradictions of existing social relations prevailing in a certain society. Production, through being directly subjected to these forces frequently becomes the site of calls for change. Consumption, in contrast, tends to "lag behind in unchanging being, because information technology does not posses the strength of production, which would betoken beyond what is unchanging; socially consumption is merely produced without itself seriously helping to produce -and merely mirrors relations whose primary need is to maintain themselves". In other words, the methods/trajectories/goals of producing tend to be a site of modify more so than the tendencies of consumption. Consumption is in important respects more conservative and passive (think of someone sitting in front end of a Goggle box) whereas production tends to play a more active role in shaping/changing current consuming habits (recollect of the production of the TV shows in question). The interaction between the two, nonetheless, is not a one-fashion street. Without getting into too much item here, the relationship is dialectical (they mutually interact with each other and causation does non go along linearly from product to consumption). Nonetheless, 'dialectical relationship' does non mean that production and consumption are equally efficacious with respect to the other. Moreover, we must not only consider the dialectical coaction between production and consumption, but likewise the internal dialectic between different modes of production throughout history (i.east. the ways in which certain productive activities are influenced past/reactions to/acquired by earlier productive activities).

I've taken this give-and-take off-target a bit, so let me attempt to bring it back to Adorno'southward indicate about the separation of consumption and production and its consequences for art. In impressionist art, or the music of Wagner, for example, the "lines between consumption and production had not however been cut... but were just wired in a more complicated way... in Wagner the preexisting schema of a harmony, which always grows out of a tension and resolution, did not emerge from the work itself but was nonetheless carried by social tradition." The shock that accompanied cubism and futurism, in contrast, was qualitatively dissimilar from the "agitation over Wagner'south supposedly wrong notes, or the supposed daubings of the Impressionists". The radical break between consumption and production every bit information technology regards mod fine art of the early 20 th century, for example, was such that art no longer "had the task of representing a reality that is preexisting for everyone in common, just rather of revealing, in its isolation, the very cracks that reality would like to cover over in lodge to exist in safe; and that, in and then doing, it repels reality". [my emphasis]

But must art be divorced from use? Why can't art continue to be embedded in the life-activities of gimmicky society and take a class that is both useful and immediately comprehensible? The reply is that information technology can and in many cases it does; simply what are the political stakes in doing and so? The "really useful fine art, which serves the purpose of lark -entertainment reading and kitsch prints, blockbuster films and striking trip the light fantastic toe tunes - is historically innocent and, despite all apparent timeliness of content, formally on a technical level this material is long out of engagement." Thus, even as certain cultural artifacts accept an immediacy that seems to suggest how timely they are, they are 'historically innocent' in that they recycle old forms and endlessly re-outcome slightly modified and repackaged forms equally new and exciting. This repetition, banality, etc. is a feature of our current social/economical guild. Then,also, is this 'historical innocence' (a mode of repression, of forgetting) in which cognition of the processes (read: political and economic struggles) by which 'we arrived at the nowadays situation' is omitted.

Thus, rather than opting for complicity and unreflective (i.e. bourgeois) affidavit of the current state of society, progressive and avant - garde artistic movements of the 20th century have sought to resist the current order. Its another event entirely how successful their strategies have been. But perhaps we could chronicle this question to the event of the 'difficulty of the new fine art'. Consider the following objection. If art is so difficult, obscure, inaccessible, challenging then on, that it is in many means "secluded, off past itself", how could it play a politically progressive role if then few people tin be afflicted by it? Adorno is worried about this problem and he notes that the "separation of art from reality endangers fine art itself... [this seclusion] threatens to go ideological -to be self-satisfied in a deadened, petit -bourgeois way, to forget its supportive human function, ultimately to become petrified into bad guildmanship ." The danger hither, in role, is that contemporary fine art could go all of the things that its philistine detractors honey to say about it. Merely clearly this danger cannot be remedied by "arbitrary accommodation to the state of social consciousness... past reversion to older, outlived and outmoded style of proceeding" for in so doing fine art would sacrifice consciousness of itself, a sacrifice no critical fine art tin afford to brand. Moreover, we should not assume that the political solution to this trouble tin can be solved by art alone, for it cannot. The economic/social conditions would themselves have to be changed besides; thus it is inappreciably a progressive position to only chastise fine art for failing to 'achieve out to all people as they are'. For the textile, economic and political conditions would have to be dissimilar for such a widespread 'reaching out' to exist a progressive motion at all: it would require that the stark work/life (work versus leisure) divide of modern capitalism be abolished, that people "independent of privilege, exist able to spend their leisure time occupied substantively and extensively with creative matters." For things to exist different, there would have to be an abolishment of the "demonically precise mechanism of advert and anesthetization that -in every moment of people'south leisure fourth dimension- prevents them from occupying themselves with actual art".

Art lone cannot secure such a change in cloth weather, but this is non to say that such conditions cannot exist inverse by whatsoever means. Recognizing the role that the social/economic structure of lodge plays in circumscribing the efficacy of art as political resistance requires also recognizing that many consumption-related 'needs' and desires are themselves the congealed effects of social/economical society on people's consciousness.

For Adorno , the argument that "the public wants kitsch" is dishonest. The need for "bad, illusory, deceptive things is generated by the all-powerful propaganda apparatus", to put the point in slightly overstated terms. In addition, the need for relaxation (instead of seeking out, during leisure time, cognitively challenging/demanding activities) is justifiable, but but because then many people are forced into "circumstances that absorb their force and time in such a way that they are no longer capable of other things."

He ends the lecture with an imperative: "Let no one come up dorsum with a rejoinder about the slothful nature of homo beings. For the suspicion is not and so easily allayed that the consciousness of the person who responds in this style is more than slothful than those on whose behalf he is responding."