ART

As I showed in the last chapter, Adorno’s critique of the culture industry is in part based on a suspicion of how much fun ‘fun’ really is. The pleasures to which the culture industry is dedicated are hollowed out, devoid of any really substantial satisfaction. Crucial to this view is the judgement that they are unthinking pleasures. Adorno argues that one of the most important conditions of the possibility of the culture industry is the careful policing of a rigid border between unreflective consumption and attentive reflection. Therefore, for these reasons among others, the culture industry is to be radically distinguished from art. Does this mean, then, that whereas the culture industry purveys a kind of dreary fun, art is serious? At first sight, Adorno’s aesthetics can appear as an unrelenting insistence on the seriousness of art. We would be wrong to attempt to dilute this insistence by making the consideration of art in Adorno’s work conform to a more recognizable and innocuous model. Art does have an unusually privileged status in Adorno’s thinking. It is worth considering in this connection, however, a set of Adorno’s reflections on the question, ‘Is art lighthearted?’ included in Notes to Literature. In these reflections, Adorno responds to a line from the poet and philosopher Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805): ‘Life is serious, art is lighthearted’. While we might expect Adorno simply to rebuff a statement such as this with an account of the seriousness of art, instead he seeks again

to question the rigid opposition between pleasure and thought. Art is not exclusively to be categorized as either serious or lighthearted. On the one hand, art has escaped the deadening rule of seriousness that prevails in reality – the seriousness which constantly exhorts that it’s a hard life in the real world – because art cannot be thought of as a part of reality in any straightforward way. To this extent, art is lighthearted. On the other hand, and again for the reason that it has escaped reality, art suggests a change in consciousness, which is to say that it contains the suggestion that it might be possible for a different kind of reality to exist. In this way, art is serious. ‘As something that has escaped from reality and is nevertheless permeated with it,’ Adorno states, ‘art vibrates between this seriousness and lightheartedness. It is this tension that constitutes art’ (NL II: 249). This is a crucial definition of art, not only because it remains true to Adorno’s criticism of the distinction between work and pleasure, but because it reveals one of the most important aspects of art in Adorno’s view. Art is both real and separate from reality, which is to say, more specifically, that art is both social and that it is critical of society. Care is needed here because, on the one hand, the social nature of any artwork is not straightforwardly to be garnered from the social context of its production, while, on the other, artworks do not criticize society simply by containing within them straightforward expressions of opinions. Introducing Adorno’s theory of the way in which artworks are both social and critical of society without simply being reduced to what they explicitly declare is one of the main tasks of this chapter. His view of the socially critical status of art is closely associated with his claim that art can have what he calls a ‘truth-content’. Again, care is needed when considering this term because artworks are not more or less true by virtue of being more or less packed full of verifiable philosophical propositions. Adorno’s conception of what it means for art in some way to be ‘true’ is equally central to this chapter.