ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to construct the basis for a sociological perspective on Art Nouveau. It examines the criteria whereby avant-gardism as such can be adequately specified. Subsequently, with the help of certain social theorists, it will be shown in what ways Art Nouveau can be legitimately judged to have been avant-gardiste. Hypotheses about the avant-gardiste content of Art Nouveau can be generated so as to confront these hypotheses with historical data and hence investigate their plausibility for the specific conjunctures under analysis. T. W. Adorno’s earlier enthusiasm for Art Nouveau appears to have become dissipated by the time he was working on Aesthetic Theory, because in that work he refers to the failure and decomposition of Jugendstil, which turned out ‘retrospectively to have been no more than a lighthearted journey without substance, as Kafka remarked’. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno insisted that the commodity form affects the work of art because the latter cannot escape partidpation in productive relations.
