ABSTRACT
For Hobson, the work of art as it is understood by Gombrich and by Ricardou is merely replica and transparent imitation, an object whose 'material unreality is ignored in our perception of it'. The work of art is 'posited as unreal' and this positing is an integral part of the imaginative participation the work incites, and not a breaking of the imaginative circuit by reflexion. For Adorno, the very existence of artworks is eminently ghostly. By their very existence, he argues, 'artworks postulate the existence of what does not exist and thereby come into conflict with the latter's actual nonexistence'. Adorno's account of artistic illusion is thus built out of a certain spectrality - a combination of antinomies. The forms and materials of art enter artworks from social reality. An additional antinomy to that between sublation and imitation occurs between the 'image character' and 'apparitional' quality of artworks as phenomena.
