ABSTRACT
Commercialised art has become a ‘system almost without a gap’,2 which renders cultural objects as commodities. Among Adorno’s more famous – or notorious – theoretical commitments is his relentless critique of the ‘culture industry’. The culture industry nurtures sentimentality, it encourages conformity and order, by reproducing structures of feeling that instruct us that the way of life offered to us is sufficient. The non-conceptual aspect of the artwork offers less to appraisal or response at a critical distance. Critique – central as it is to the Adornian political world view – is incomplete in relation to the artwork, because it happens at a removal from the thing itself, and because like all conceptualisations of things themselves. Critical distance for the performance participant, as well as for the professional critic or academic, doesn’t have a persuasive claim to primacy over immediate experience.
