Theodor Adorno Art Quotations

In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts...

The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.