ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the relevance of art's autonomous structure in a context where, Theodor W. Adorno maintains, 'art becomes human only when it gives notice that it will not play a serving role'. It provides art's relevance to humanity a non-consolatory character where its relationship with humanity stands on deliberate incompatibility. The location of art's relevance rests on a diaphanous distinction which has often been torn down, or overlooked, by many who acted as art's would-be patrons. To state that 'only as realism could art be autonomous', one needs to qualify realism as non-identical. Art could only reject its commodification by rejecting any grammar which requires of it to serve the grammar's reality. The alternating mechanism of tolerance and suppression has similar implications when the issue of the art-form's relevance becomes a central aesthetic question. Georg Lukacs's tautology implies that realism is a description of the art-form as particularity, and equally, realism is a condition of the art-form's autonomy.
