This book brings together two of the most important figures of twentieth-century criticism, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, to consider a topic that was central to their thinking: the place of and reason for art in society and culture. Thijs Lijster takes us through points of agreement and disagreement between the two on such key topics as the relationship between art and historical experience, between avant-garde art and mass culture, and between the intellectual and the public. He also addresses the continuing relevance of Benjamin and Adorno to ongoing debates in contemporary aesthetics, such as the end of art, the historical meaning of art, and the role of the critic.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Critique of Art
- 1. Autonomy and Critique
- 1.1 Introduction
- 1.2 The birth of autonomy
- 1.3 The artist in the marketplace
- 1.4 Art versus society
- 1.5 Conclusion
- 2. Ends of Art
- 2.1 Introduction
- 2.2 Annihilation of semblance: Baroque allegory
- 2.3 Allegory and commodity
- 2.4 Proliferation of the aesthetic: technological reproducibility
- 2.5 Adorno’s dialectic of semblance
- 2.6 Culture industry: the social liquidation of art
- 2.7 Modernism: self-critique of semblance
- 2.8 Conclusion
- Excursus I – The (N)everending Story
- Hegel and the beginning of the end
- Danto’s post-historical pluralism
- Vattimo’s weak reality
- Conclusion
- 3. Experience, History, and Art
- 3.1 Introduction
- 3.2 Benjamin’s concept of experience
- 3.3 Experience and history
- 3.4 Art history and monadology
- 3.5 Adorno: experience and mimesis
- 3.6 Natural history
- 3.7 The tendency of the material and the crystallization of the monad
- 3.8 Conclusion
- Excursus II – Base and Superstructure Reconsidered
- Struggling with a metaphor
- A farewell to Marx
- A parallax view on historical materialism
- Conclusion
- 4. The Art of Critique
- 4.1 Introduction
- 4.2 Benjamin’s reading of the early German Romantics
- 4.3 Revolutionary criticism
- 4.4 An exemplary piece of criticism: Benjamin’s Goethe essay
- 4.5 Adorno’s immanent criticism
- 4.6 The necessity, and impossibility, of criticism
- 4.7 Adorno’s Mahler
- 4.8 Conclusion
- Excursus III – Where is the Critic?
- Rise and fall of the critic
- Why criticism?
- The critic as intellectual
- Conclusion
- Conclusion
- ‘A distance, however close’
- The ‘actuality’ of Benjamin and Adorno
- Critical models
- Post-Fordism and the new spirit of capitalism
- Becoming life versus resistance
- Appendix – Notes on a Camp
- Bibliography
- Index
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