Contemporary Society and Art Essay

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Adorno correct in charging that "art as commodity" has no redeeming aesthetic value?

As frequently stated by Adorno, the 'aesthetic' element has failed to keep up with progresses in the art field. Ever since its expression as an area of examination, aesthetics has typically failed to achieve its goal of explaining, identifying or evaluating its object that, chiefly, continues to be art. Moreover, frequently, artists who doubted aesthetics' contribution raised the question of why some people waste their and others' time aiming at getting value judgments, not realizing that value judgments are all they ultimately receive (Bernstein, 185).

Art as a concept hesitates when it comes to getting defined, as it is traditionally an evolving collection of moments. Also, its nature can't be determined by retracing one's path to its origins, seeking a basic, initial layer reinforcing all else. The latter age romantics considered ancient art as pure and supreme. Their perspective is just as compelling as the classicists' perspective, that ancient artworks were muddy and impure, because of their close association with magic, practical goals (such as long-distance communication through blowing and calling out sounds), and historical records (Adorno, 6). One can simply not decide the issue since it is difficult to obtain historical facts.

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Contemporary society gives no value to art, responding to it only pathologically. Art is only alive now as a concrete cultural tradition and an amusement for box-office customers; it has no importance as an entity. True individual aesthetic pleasure represents liberation from the pragmatic entirety of being-for-others. This was, perhaps, first realized by Schopenhauer. The joy of being surrounded by art is actually a feel of having abruptly escaped, rather than a part of reality art escaped from. Happiness constitutes an unintentional flash of art, not as relevant as that attending artistic knowledge. To sum up, one must discard the very notion of pleasure being art's essence. As noted by Hegel, all emotional reactions to aesthetic objects are largely tarnished by psychological contingency (Hohendahl, 35). Artworks actually require us to have knowledge or, to put it in better terms, a cognitive ability to make just judgment: i.e., artists wish for spectators to understand the truths and falsities in art.

In other words, artworks aren't associated with their referents (whose truth they institute, divulge and identify). Rather, they create an equivalence system wherein they function based on a network of mutually reliant meanings.….....

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