ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Frankfurt School critical theory understood art as a central site where the totalizing tendencies of society could be disputed, problematized, and opposed. The chapter considers how this approach grows out of certain historical developments in how art ought to be understood. To help the reader grasp such an approach, it considers several different kinds of examples in literature and music. The chapter considers how art can be understood as distinct from mere entertainment or consumption, and how art can serve as a means to transform the very nature of the human self, thereby offering more possibilities for maturity and action. Central figures and topics discussed are art, autonomy of art, beauty, Kant, German Idealism, Adorno, Marcuse, judgment, Earl of Shaftesbury, Baumgarten, Hume, Critique of Judgment, suffering, form, Danto, Cavell, Schoenberg, Beckett, industrial, punk, Cage, negativity, Freud, the shudder, sensibility, transfiguration, conversion, Robert Warshow, and Nietzsche.
