ABSTRACT
This chapter describes items from Adorno's bag of aesthetic theory and see what can be of use to us. It examines three pieces: purposelessness, spiritualisation, and suffering; politics, an aspect of art that Adorno pointedly discarded and highlights the links between Adorno and Weber. Immanuel Kant’s formulation of art as ‘purposive without a purpose’ ranged the aesthetic against all other ends, especially practical utility. There is, as Adorno indicates, the purposiveness of the whole art object itself but, as Kant starts to articulate, this object is only art if it is part of taste. The art object is, on one level, thoroughly subjective in terms of creation and reception, but as a material object it only becomes art through the combined judgement of the arbiters of taste. Taste is the foundation of Kant’s aesthetic theory of course, and from such a starting point Kant initially rejects, and then labours to try to retrieve a moral dimension for the aesthetic.
