Teoria estetica

by Theodor W. Adorno, Giovanni Matteucci (Translator), Fabrizio Desideri (Editor)

Nuova edizione italiana a cura di Fabrizio Desideri, Giovanni Matteucci

Teoria estetica, che qui si presenta in una nuova traduzione attenta a restituirne le peculiarità stilistico-espressive, è l'ultima opera a cui ha lavorato Adorno. Rimasto allo stato di grande frammento per l'improvvisa morte dell'autore (1969), questo testo rappresenta l'estremo punto di approdo della riflessione adorniana, che si volge alla realtà dell'arte rimeditando esperienze che hanno segnato il Novecento (da Valéry a Beckett, da Schönberg a Celan, da Klee a Brecht), per tentare però di cogliere le dinamiche costitutive dell'opera d'arte in generale e documenta un pensiero all'atto del suo stesso istituirsi nel confronto con ciò che maggiormente sfugge alla discorsività razionale, appunto la dimensione concreta dell'arte. L'estetico viene inteso da Adorno come il luogo di massima negatività per la ragione, ma non nel senso di qualcosa da esiliare nell'irrazionale, bensí nel senso di ciò che, in quanto costitutivamente altro, muove dall'interno e sollecita il pensiero dialettico nell'epoca della piena affermatività. La presa di distanza da facili schemi ideologici che riducono la creazione artistica a veicolo di messaggi, la demistificazione dell'edonismo che impera nella concezione dell'esperienza estetica propria del senso comune borghese, la sottile analisi delle implicazioni sottese ai rapporti dialettici tra arte, natura e mito, e non da ultimo la lucida enucleazione delle difficoltà in cui è invischiata la stessa tradizione della filosofia moderna dell'arte, fanno di Teoria estetica di Adorno uno dei massimi testi del Novecento filosofico ed estetico, in grado di dialogare con l'orizzonte culturale dell'odierna contemporaneità.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction, Theory, German Literature, Essays, Germany

507 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

Reviews

[Sir Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do not let the title mislead you: This is not light reading.

Aesthetic Theory is like an endless search for what exactly art is. Why do people bother making music, writing, painting. What is art trying to accomplish, why is it there at all. Art is the elusive main character that nearly four hundred pages of dense theory attempts to grasp.

On a grand level art, according to Adorno, is (1) against the world and polemical towards society (“by crystallizing itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as ‘socially useful,’ it [Art] criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it”); (2) inherently affirmative (positive), and (3) aloof from the “culture industry” and commoditization.

The culture industry, imbued in art hatred, is what contributes to the marketing and unnecessary aura and debris that surrounds the artwork. Like when you hear about a given Big-Name Author, a photo or a news story might come to mind or his charming demeanor in interviews instead of the actual text of his works. Or the glossy photos of authors on the backs of novels by NYC/London/Paris photography firms, which epitomize the culture industry Adorno despises. Adorno was extremely sensitive about consumerism. For him, it threatened everything. (“The marrow of experience has been sucked out; there is none, not even that apparently set at a remove from commerce, that has not been gnawed away.”) Part of this comes from being an immigrant and having to adjust to the garishness and product-mania of American culture, I think.

So big questions are addressed, like: Is art supposed to enjoyed? The answer is no. “The more artworks are understood, the less they are enjoyed.” Art is not just a fancy kind of amusement. The “enjoyment” Adorno is criticizing is the fixation on what do I get out of it or valuing art only insofar as it’s a good time.

“Whoever disappears into the artwork thereby gains dispensation from the impoverishment of a life that is always too little.” This seems to be a recurring motif in Western thought. Writing is there because of the inherently dissatisfying nature of existence. Or because the Golden Age is gone or Utopia has not come to being yet. (See the end of Eagleton’s Literary Theory for a perfect expression of such a utopist yearning: Eagleton states that if social conditions were able to reach a state that was mutually beneficial for everyone (Eagleton is thinking of a Marxist Paradise) he would be able to drop his pen and do something “more worthwhile” with his time. I can’t imagine what this “more worthwhile” thing might be). Existence alone should be enough—-but it’s not. Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which obsesses over Rousseau’s writings about writing covers this pathology to a maddening degree. Rousseau called writing the dangerous supplement. He was addicted to writing, even though he saw it as nothing more than a debased representation of speech, or a corruption of pure presence.

New paragraph. Though Adorno would never put it this way, art is also transcendental: “Art is the semblance of what is beyond death’s reach.” Real art gives you a glimpse beyond the prison of selfhood. “This experience is contrary to the weakening of the I that the culture industry manipulates.” So the culture industry (as anyone can see if you look at the ads in the train) continually encourages and reaffirms a celebration of Self with a deluge of imagery and text addressed at once directly to You, but also at everyone else at the same time. It is You who is lionized, and every I is encouraged to fixate on itself and its wants (yes, paradoxical that everyone’s uniqueness is appealed to, that the way to “express yourself” is to buy a product that millions of others will buy). Advertising encourages self-adoration and self-fixation, but though celebrated at every turn, it is a Self that is not self-sufficient or strong, it’s a Self that is dependent on their status symbols and image management to come to full fruition.

Adorno refers to this I, this debased self, as the “internal agent of repression.”

He also holds that the products of mainstream culture are shallower and more standardized than any of the actual people participating in the culture. That is, most of this art is beneath everyone.

Adorno says that any given artwork is on some level alien to itself, that there are aspects of the Novel for example that are contrary to the idea of the free artistic volition of the creator. He goes on to say that this “element of self-alieness” within an artwork is what is meant by the word genius as the word is understood in its pure form. This is genius not as a celebration of the creative subject, which Adorno was suspicious of, as he sees the emphasis placed on the creator behind the work as being a kind of PR mask used by those who want to sell the work (this is akin to Benjamin’s critique of Hollywood way back in the 40s: that it’s in the best interest of Hollywood that the focus be on the persona of the actors and not on the quality of the product). I think Adorno is saying that the objective work is no longer the author’s, or that it was never “owned” by the author in the first place. The pure concept of genius, according to Adorno, attempts to fuse the free individual with the grand authenticity of art. A true act of genius is out of the genius’s hands; the author is irrelevant once the work is accomplished, since the author’s genius has been dissolved into the work.

He then goes on to state that the word genius came into vogue in the late eighteenth century, and that at that time it had little to do with glorifying the artist. “Any individual could become a genius to the extent that he expressed himself unconventionally as nature. Genius was an attitude to reality, ‘ingenious doings,’ indeed almost a conviction or frame of mind.”

And finally, what good would a real theorist be if he didn’t take swipes at the bourgeoisie. Maybe you’ve wondered why music on the radio is so bad, why terrible movies repeatedly make so much money, etc. Adorno has an answer: “The bourgeois character tends to cling to what is inferior.”

Art =

“Art brings to light what is infantile in the ideal of being grown up.”

“Art today is scarcely conceivable except as a form of reaction that anticipates the apocalypse.”

“Artworks fall hopelessly mute before the question ‘What’s it for?’ and before the reproach that they are actually pointless.”

“Art, however, does not sink to the level of ideology....”

“Artworks exercise a practical effect, if they do so at all, not by haranguing but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness.... Artworks correspond to the objective need for a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality.”

“Life would be possible without art, too.... In a society that has disaccustomed men and women from thinking beyond themselves, whatever surpasses the mere reproduction of their life and those things they have been drilled to believe they cannot get along without, is superfluous.”

“The perpetuation of existing society is incompatible with consciousness of itself, and art is punished for every trace of such consciousness. From this perspective as well, ideology—-false consciousness—-is socially necessary.”

“For art, ‘good enough’ is never good enough.”

“Art is the ever-broken promise of happiness.”

[Ldinunzio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dense dense dense.
Ever want to spend a little too much time reading one sentence then realize it has been three months? Worth the read for what is going on, but prepare yourself. You are not prepared.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Relentless, repetitive and a dead end in all sorts of ways but he's right and you and I are wrong.

[Michal Lipták · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m used to difficult stuff, but this was indeed something. I’m not going to provide detailed account, just some quick overview of issues. And in that account, the reflections will be progressively more personal. Therefore the issues addressed may not be necessarily the most central – but it may give you an idea about the way of thinking in this book.

THE THEORY

It should be pointed out that this book is unfinished. In particular, this means that the material – the text itself – is already all there, but what Adorno didn’t get to do was to organize the material. Therefore, it is sometimes repetitive, and sometimes contradictory (and not in that good, dialectical way). However, the matter, as well as the form – rather free-form, with hundreds of pages of text without chapter headings, and paragraphs running for several pages – is as it should be already.

Rather than proceeding thorugh some continuous argument, or developing his terminological apparatus, Adorno is drawing “concentric circles” capturing several topics at once. Adorno is simultaneously (1) tracing relationship between art and society, art and nature, art and truth, art and politics; (2) discussing basic aesthetic categories of Kant and Hegel, mainly (and Benjamin, see below); (3) conducting art critical inquiries into modern art itself, mainly avantgarde music (and Beckett in literature, whereby he was supposed to be the dedicatee of the book; btw, if you want a combination of both, Kurtág’s recent opera Fin de partie is as good as it gets).

It would be too much here to even give a glance how this drawing of concentric circles looks like, so to put it as succinctly as possible: Adorno tries to approach art in non-reductive way. Which means that art is something like a zero-point of sustained contradictions.

For example – in relation to society, work of art is both a monad, enclosed in itself, purposeless in Kantian sense, and fait social, which partakes in the history, social development, economy, politics, and so on, by the very fact of it being a something created – an artifact. Cancellation of each of these poles leads to worthless art work (Adorno emphasizes that philosophical aesthetics can’t be value-neutral), which leads to cancellation of art. This leads to seemingly contradictory statement that art can partake in society only as a monad (therefore, Adorno is, for example, strongly skeptical of worth of any overtly “political art”, in particular of engaged works of socialist realism; Soviet avantgarde films of 1920s maybe being an exception).

So this is kind of stuff explored relentlessly here. The ultimate contradiction which art has to sustain is the danger of its cancellation. This can be only sustained by the art keeping its worth. Maybe the best expression of this is that art must promise happiness in such a way that its promise is trusted, but it must always break its promise.

Moreover, art criticism and philosophical aesthetics are crucial accessories of art. They have to work as – as Heidegger would put it – preservers [die Bewahrenden]. They have to remind us of broken promises, of unhappiness, they should always reignite the memories of horrors.

BENJAMIN

It is very helpful to have some grasp of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy. Adorno uses certain central concepts of Benjamin’s philosophy – mainly truth content [Wahrheitsgehalt], aura, though dialectic image also makes appearance – and, moreover, tackles it obsessively (knowing that Adorno and Benjamin were very good friends, it’s kind of cute), especially worried – even after all those years – by Benjamin’s apotheosis of political mass art in Artwork essay.

It’s interesting to think about differences in the style of thinking between them, though. Adorno’s reflection is relentless and endless, which in the end makes him somehow isolated. Benjamin’s reflection can likewise be relentless (especially in Trauerspiel study), but at several moments he actually infinitely condenses it into something like slogans, which should explode the theory. In short – it’s no surprise that Adorno balked and then ran away when confronted with bare-breasted radical students, but I wonder what Benjamin would have done.

MUSIC

It also helps immensely if you are familiar – and thought about – the examples from avantgarde music that Adorno uses: Schönberg, Berg, Webern, but also Stockhausen, Boulez, Stravinsky, Krenek, Ligeti, and so on.

I spent more than a decade with these guys.

I also read Philosophy of New Music when I was like 20. I don’t think I understood much of it. I remembered the idea that “the material is historical”, i.e. that sound itself should be understood as part of historical becoming. I remembered the follow-up idea that there is something like unfolding of Hegelian Geist in this historical becoming of material, but that this doesn’t mean that composers are mere conduits for the objective necessity. No, whatever objective necessity must be subjectively expressed. Failing to pay due to both objective and subjective, content and form, expression and articulation, universal and particular – results in works of art that fail to sustain the contradiction, and fail as art by actually making true on their promise. Works that are too perfect are actually worthless.

Schönberg’s music was great because he set himself all the correct tasks, and then failed, as he should. I remembered this being maybe the most insulting compliment ever.

Reading now the greater elaboration of this theory, I’m kind of surprised by the degree that earlier book influenced by thinking – maybe not even by some direct understanding of its theses, but by some kind of osmosis or whatever. Or maybe my thinking had aligned with Adorno’s even before reading him – who knows. Surprisingly, reading Aesthetic Theory now – as infuriating and tiring it was (not gonna lie) – helped me to organize my thoughts a lot. It may be opaque – an analytical philosopher’s nightmare – but it brought clarity.

Concerning that alignment: as far as I remember I approached musical works as unsolvable problems – even ethical problems –, as endless struggles, as sources of anxiety. As far as I remember I had equated great art with a very peculiar sort of failure, a kind of imperfection, something which is unable to resolve itself. The works that do resolve themselves I considered a more straightforward kind of failure – a bad work of art, simply – to be rated accordingly in whatever online database I was currently taking part.

It later developed into dissertation in phenomenological aesthetics, based mainly on Husserl, with central thesis being that art is a sustained conflict. The German word here is Widerstreit, which can be understood as contradiction, too.

PHENOMENOLOGY

So, of course, I did notice that Adorno can’t avoid a jab at phenomenology:

As a phenomenology of art, phenomenology would like to develop art neither by deducing it from its philosophical concept nor by rising to it through comparative abstraction; rather, phenomenology wants to say what art is. The essence it discerns is, for phenomenology, art’s origin and at the same time the criterion of art’s truth and falsehood. But what phenomenology has conjured up in art as with a wave of the magic wand, remains extremely superficial and relatively fruitless when confronted with actual artworks. Whoever wants something more must engage a level of content that is incompatible with the phenomenological commandment of pure essentiality. The phenomenology of art comes to grief on the presupposition of the possibility of being without presupposition.

However, this quote works only with a caricature of Wesenschau, not unlike the one Lukács came with in his criticism of Scheler (it may have been correct for criticism of Scheler, though, I never bothered that much about him). The essence of art is not conjured and then used as a starting point – rather, the essence is malleable, it’s constantly rethought, reinterpreted, the reflection constantly renews itself. Husserl’s tortuous journey within phenomenology – always starting anew – attests to this.

So I was not bothered by this jab. However, the next one was actually troubling:

Art mocks efforts to reduce it to pure essentiality. It is not what it was fated to have been from time immemorial but rather what it has become.

The first part is wrong – and phenomenological approach is non-reductive in the very same way Adorno’s, as described above. However, for the latter part I was reminded by a quote from Merleau-Ponty’s L’Œil et l’Esprit which I used a lot and which may have mislead me once:

In whatever civilization it is born, from whatever beliefs, motives, or thoughts, no matter what ceremonies surround it—and even when it appears devoted to something else—from Lascaux to our time, pure or impure, figurative or not, painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility.

Isn’t this precisely the incorrect assignment of fate to art?

The danger is partially avoided by reading this as account of Ursprung (in sense of Heidegger’s Kunstwerk essay, Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study and Husserl’s analysis of Origin of Geometry - and, after all, Adorno himself hints at such notion in the first quote; Derrida provided best criticism of this notion of origin, but I don’t feel endangered by it, for the reasons written in a review of Speech and Phenomena); that is, rather than discovering an essence static throughout history, you’re discovering a source – or at least hinting at the possibility of source – without equating the source with truth.

That is, it’s not about claiming that all issues of a particular work of art can be reduced to the issue of perception, or that perception is the guiding principle of any work of art (though it’s difficult not to read precisely this into the Merleau-Ponty’s quote above) – rather, that you will find the issue of perception in each work of art, as a kind of skeleton, a nail on which it hangs. Sometimes it will have central position, sometimes not – but it’s useful to have this structure traced.

Phenomenology provides one precisely by tools to trace these basic structures. Heeding Adorno’s jabs as the reminders that these basic structures are not necessarily the art’s truth, phenomenology of art should be equipped to provide even better aesthetic theory than Adorno did. It should be non-reductive and with a sort of centrifugal movement involve issues of history and politics. Such book is yet to be written, though.

As it stands, though, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is indispensable. Yes, it’s difficult and opaque, but the difficulty matches the difficulty of the theme at hand. Art’s difficult – we may have forgotten it, we may have suppressed it, but it is.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life happens, unfortunately. It would be swell to exist in a realm where death and history did not interfere with works-in-progress. I jest, I jest. The fact that Adorno had to leave this text "unfinished" and fragmentary is remarkably congruous with the theory itself; a macabre coincidence, ruse of history or what you will. There is nothing extraneous here, not one wasted word. One can read and reread and still not exhaust the page. Banished to a deserted island, this would be the book I'd want with me.

[Daniel Benshana]

if you want to know where Duchamp got it from and have an almost metaphysical experience of what art is, read this. You may not end up agreeing with him but he will take you to places no other art critic or philosopher has gone..

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

yay philosophical curmudgeonism!

[Imen Inoubli Gharbi /reading bookswith imen · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are books that offer insight, books that challenge, and then there are books that change the very way we perceive the world—Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory belongs to this rare category. It is not just a work of philosophy; it is an act of intellectual resistance, a manifesto of art’s potential to defy conformity in a society increasingly shaped by commodification, distraction, and oppression.

To read Aesthetic Theory is to enter a dense forest of thought, thick with abstraction, historical references, and dialectical twists. But for those who dare to wander, it becomes a journey of profound revelation.
Adorno writes from a historical moment steeped in trauma—the aftermath of World War II, the rise of fascism, and the growing dominance of the capitalist culture industry. For him, the question is no longer merely, “What is beauty?” but rather: “What can art still do in a damaged world?”

Adorno’s answer is clear, though never simple: art must resist. Real art, he insists, must not soothe or serve. It must not pander to markets or ideologies. Instead, it must embody contradiction. It must refuse to be reduced to entertainment or utility. Art must be difficult—dissonant even—not because difficulty is noble, but because truth, in an untrue world, must be wrestled with.

Adorno’s understanding of beauty is not nostalgic or decorative. Beauty, to him, is the reconciliation of form and chaos, an unstable harmony that acknowledges the violence of history without pretending to resolve it. He rejects the classical ideal of serene, balanced beauty. Instead, he looks to works like Schoenberg’s atonal music or Beckett’s minimalist theater—fractured, fragmented, and uncomfortable—as more truthful reflections of modern existence.

Form is central to his theory. Aesthetic form, Adorno argues, is not just a frame—it is the very structure through which contradiction is lived and expressed. Art gains its autonomy precisely by refusing to be “about” something in a straightforward way. It becomes a kind of negative knowledge: it does not tell us what is, but reveals what is missing, what is broken.

The most compelling tension in Aesthetic Theory is between art’s autonomy and its embeddedness in society. Adorno insists that art must be autonomous—it must not be propaganda, it must not be merely illustrative, it must not serve anything other than its own immanent form. Yet, at the same time, art cannot escape the society in which it is produced. This paradox is where true art lives: in the unresolved, painful contradiction between freedom and determination.
Adorno’s thinking is dialectical in the Hegelian sense: every assertion is tested against its opposite, and truth emerges not as a stable position but as a movement—a dynamic, unresolved process. This is also how he views great artworks: not as messages, but as fields of tension, spaces where contradictions are suspended rather than solved.

Adorno’s language is dense, his references vast, his style elliptical and fragmentary. This is not a flaw. It is a reflection of his fundamental commitment to resisting simplification. Just as genuine art resists easy consumption, so too does this book. It demands of the reader what Adorno believes art should demand of its audience: engagement, patience, thought.

Yet there is a kind of beauty in the prose—especially when read aloud. His sentences do not walk; they spiral, layering insight upon insight, asking the reader not just to understand but to think alongside. In a world obsessed with instant clarity, Adorno’s refusal to “translate” deepens his critique of a society addicted to immediacy.

9 Adorno’s voice is more urgent than ever. He reminds us that art is not just decoration or distraction. Art is, or can be, a sanctuary of resistance, a vessel of memory, a site of struggle.

He does not offer answers, and he certainly does not offer comfort. What he offers is harder but infinitely more valuable: a way to stay awake, to remain sensitive to truth in a world that rewards forgetting.

Casual readers or those unfamiliar with German Idealism or Marxist thought may find the text daunting. But with patience—and perhaps a good secondary guide—it is deeply rewarding.

Aesthetic Theory is not a book to read once. It is a book to return to, to argue with, to sit beside in silence. It does not aim to explain art—it performs art’s task through its very form: to interrupt, to displace, and ultimately to awaken.

In a time when truth itself feels increasingly fragile, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory offers a powerful, uncompromising reminder: art matters because it does not obey.

[Farouk Adil · Rating 5 out of 5]

هذا الكتاب من اهم الكتب النقدية الفنية في القرن العشرين كان مقرر ان يهدى الكتاب الى صامويل بيكيت يمثل هذا الكتاب عدم فهم الفن ولامعقوليته ويبين ان الحرية المطلقة في الفن تبقى حرية في ماهو جزئي انما تتناقض مع الوضع الدائم لانعدام الحرية ضمن الكل وفي هذا الكل بات حيز الفن غير موثوق به ،اتذكر خروجي في احد الايام الممطرة لاقتناء هذا الكتاب عند ترجمته الى اللغة العربية ،ناجي العونلي قدم اسهام كبير للحضارة العربية بترجمة هذا الكتاب المهم وايضا تحصل على جائزة الشيخ زايد للترجمة لعام 2018 ،ادورنو احد النماذج الاوربية والقليلة التي كانت مثال حقيقي للتنوع المعرفي من موسيقى وادب وفلسفة وانثروبولوجيا وسياسة ونقد فني كان موسيقيا وناقد فني وناقد موسيقي مهم (لم تترجم كتبه النقدية الموسيقية الى العربية الى حد الان )تتلمذ ايضا على يد الموسيقي البان بيرغ احد اهم المؤلفين من المدرسة النمساوية الموسيقية الثانية في القرن العشرين .

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

bible

[Carl Denton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE THIS BOOK

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

It cannot be disputed that this book by Adorno bears the marks of a mathematical-scientific work, rather than the traditional poetic-linguistic work of literature or philosophy; it is literally an endless series of propositions, observations and conclusions seemingly without breaks, paragraphs or visual spacing. Over the past few years I have read other books in this series of literary-slash-philosophical studies issued by the University of Minnesota Press such as those by Hans Jauss, Jean-Luc Nancy, Helene Cixous, Giorgio Agamben, and I have to admit I find these books -- even those by the well-regarded Jean-Francois Lyotard and Paul de Man -- to be on some level repellant and half-intellectual, as it appeared to me that the machinery of the culture industry that Adorno inveighed against so vehemently has infected the academic "industry" too. From the list of titles issued by the same publisher, it seems that a plethora of writers have churned out volume after volume filled with pages that purport to employ critical theory in the same spirit that Adorno did. Nevertheless, from my experience reading these works, it seems that the authors are growing more and more superficial with each passing generational wave due, no doubt, to the postmodern condition which makes a shared cultural background of historical knowledge an impossibility. It seems to me that all of these authors are trying to re-stage the intellectual drama of Nietzsche's youthful philosophical discoveries, but what level of success they have achieved remains a matter of considerable doubt. In my opinion, all of these writers are second-rate in comparison to the master theorist Theodor Adorno, whose Aesthetic Theory was published posthumously in 1984, nearly twenty years after his death. In evaluating this work, I think we should consider that the unique quality of a work of art lies in its power to seduce us with its promise to serve as an entrance into paradise, and this is reflected in Adorno's writing, a utopia of unlimited text, with a minimum of blank space, which stands as a leitmotiv for his conception of a Gesamtkunstwerk, the comprehensive, all-embracing, total work of art. This points to the advent of virtual reality as the complete and total form of self-alienating artwork, the apotheosis and realization of Antonin Artaud's theater of cruelty. Three stars.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pesar de solamente haber leído algunos capítulos, es una lectura bastante exigente, aunque en Adorno eso no sorprenda.

[Phoenix Sapp · Rating 3 out of 5]

girlie really came in and predicted the rise of predictable mass media as a means of stopping us from critically engaging with the world and then dipped....I wonder what he thinks of booktok

[sardinosaure 🦕 · Rating 4 out of 5]

on prépare des folies pt.3

[Anttoni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paljon sekavia horinoita mutta sekavuudesaankin oivaltavaa ja paikoin jopa viihdyttävää.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfinished at Adorno's death, Aesthetic Theory exists as a bundle of drafts and marginalia. Because of its incompletion and the editorial mish-mash of its existing state, this is difficult to sum up as a whole, especially given that by the two hundred-page marker we've made it to half-baked rants. Still, if there's an underlying thesis here, it's contained in the maxim: "An artwork is always itself and simultaneously the other of itself." It's a sort of paraphrase of Benjamin's paradox of art (that is, "the paradox of the beautiful is that it appears"), and Adorno rephrases it repeatedly to different effects: "To make things of which we do not know what they are," and "Unlike anything human, art lays claim to being unable to lie, and thus it is compelled to lie." The book is mostly filled with small observations about the nature of art, but (to his credit) no concrete general criteria ("Art has no universal laws"). Some examples: realist art is "not the imitation of nature but the imitation of natural beauty" (a distinction I find quite helpful); and (in his rebuttal of Alois Reigl's concept Kunstwollen) "it is hardly ever the case that what is decisive in a work of art is what the artist intended," a difference Adorno later calls an "index of failure."

[Nothing · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty great, stimulating theory of literature, until he starts looking at specific poems and poets, and you realise that Adorno is not actually a very good literary critic. apparently once he comes down out of critiques of heidegger and hegelian dialectic to actual flat-surfaced, ambiguous signifiers, there occurs that most common syndrome: the altitudinal brain seizure.

also, proceeds to deconstruct a lot of very reductive labels, and then just calls Celan "hermetic". and Celan was not happy. and Celan was right.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adorno's style is headspinning. Written in a recursive fashion, not linear. Demands close reading, like poetry, though here with concepts rather images or tropes. One could read subsections of each major book section and get enough of what you need. In the current theoretical climate, though, there is some question whether his focus on self-contained aesthetic objects, or the categorical autonomy of art as art, will survive.

[Jamie]

Painful and annoying.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 2 out of 5]

Art is a product in capitalism. That is the only rescatable sentence I can come up with.

The critique to socialism is horrendous: Adorno ends up being a marionette of the system.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

L'arte non ha leggi universali, di certo però in ognuna delle sue fasi vigono divieti obiettivamente vincolanti. Questi si irradiano dalle opere canoniche. L'esistenza di esse intima subito che cosa da lì in avanti non sarà più possibile. (Paralipomena, p.418)

Complessa opera postuma e incompiuta di Adorno, Teoria estetica è un enorme frammento di oltre quattrocento pagine in cui il filosofo intraprende una tortuosa ricerca alla scoperta dell'arte del XX secolo tra le opere di Beckett, Valéry, Klee, Debussy, Dalì, confrontandosi, nel mentre, con le teorie estetiche dei due secoli precedenti, in particolar modo con Schiller, Kant e Hegel.

La struttura delle riflessioni di Adorno è spiraliforme, quasi simile alla logica hegeliana, giacché l'intento di spingere l'arte dall'interno per farne emergere la sua vera essenza si snoda in un'eterogeneità di riferimenti e concetti che potrebbero cogliere impreparato qualunque tipo di lettore: per entrare nel vivo di questo lavoro, infatti, è richiesta una preparazione artistica e filosofica di alto livello, nonché una costante attenzione alla densità dei contenuti espressi dal filosofo in ogni singola frase, poiché molte tematiche si sovrappongono tra loro, si perdono per poi essere recuperate in un ragionamento assolutamente asistematico.

Nonostante questa difficoltà nel superare la barriera culturale di Adorno, l'orizzonte filosofico che viene tracciato nell'opera è di altissima qualità e di ispirazione per tutti coloro interessati all'estetica del secolo scorso, sicché troveranno tra le righe di questo impenetrabile testo un sacco di spunti per costruire il proprio percorso alla ricerca del senso dell'arte e del bello.

Tracciare, pertanto, una recensione completa su questo lavoro è impossibile, tuttavia ci sono diversi spunti che sono riuscito a trarre dalla lettura, primo tra tutti il cosiddetto "godimento dell'arte", che secondo Adorno è inesistente nei confronti delle presunte opere d'arte. Infatti, scrive il filosofo francofortese:

Chi gode delle opere d'arte in modo fattualmente concreto è un filisteo; espressioni come "delizia per gli orecchi" ne provano la colpevolezza. Ma se l'ultima traccia di godimento fosse estirpata, la domanda su perché ci sono in generale le opere d'arte creerebbe imbarazzo. Di fatto le opere d'arte vengono tanto meno godute quanto più uno ne capisce. (Arte, estetica, società - "Godimento dell'arte", p.19)

Osservando le opere di un De Chirico o di un Dalì lo stupore lascia spazio agli interrogativi su quale senso pervada le loro tele, e a detta di Adorno, l'intenzionalità deve essere taciuta:

Ma alle opere d'arte riesce sempre più difficile comporsi come connessione di senso. A ciò esse rispondono alla fine con la rinuncia all'idea di essa. Quanto più l'emancipazione del soggetto ha demolito tutte le immagini di un ordine già dato e capace di dar senso, tanto più problematico diventa il concetto del senso quale rifugio della sempre più sbiadita teleologia. (Concordanza del senso - crisi del senso, p.205)

Un'altra interessante riflessione di Adorno verte sull'evoluzione delle categorie di bello e di brutto; già a partire dai Minima Moralia, è criticato, soprattutto, il concetto di "kitsch", che si propone come punto focale di una nuova e quanto più ambigua "dialettica della bellezza" che ha attraversato tutto lo sviluppo dell'arte novecentesca:

Nella storia dell'arte la dialettica del brutto risucchia in sé anche la categoria del bello; da questo punto di vista il kitsch è il bello in quanto brutto, tabuizzato in nome dello stesso bello che esso un tempo è stato e ora contraddice in assenza del proprio antagonista. (Sulle categorie del brutto, del bello e della tecnica - sulla categoria del brutto, p.65)

In questi termini il brutto si discosta da come lo aveva inteso Rosenkranz, cioè un momento necessario per lo sviluppo del bello, e la sua mediazione attraverso il comico si perde: esso non ritorna all'idea di bello comunemente intesa, bensì fonda esso stesso una nuova "categoria" di bellezza. Il taglio nervoso e la linea incisiva di Schiele, ad esempio, tradiscono, nella loro apparente bruttezza, una bellezza psicologica ed introspettiva di altissimo rilievo, ci comunicano qualcosa di molto più profondo del semplice dolore dell'esistenza, rivelano quell'angoscia caratteristica in ognuno di noi.

Lo spirito nelle opere d'arte trascende sia la loro cosalità sia il fenomeno sensibile e tuttavia sussiste solo nella misura in cui sussistono quei momenti. In negativo ciò vuol dire che nelle opere d'arte niente è letterale, meno che mai le loro parole; lo spirito è il loro etere, ciò che parla attraverso di esse, o, in maniera forse più rigorosa, ciò che le rende scrittura. (Il bello artistico: "apparition", spiritualizzazione, evidenza - l'arte come qualcosa di spirituale, p. 117)

In aperta polemica con Kandinskij, Adorno contesta la pretesa di poter tracciare una teoria dei colori e delle linee: il loro significato può solo essere espresso mediante termini puramente trascendentali. In Kandinskij le composizioni si leggono mediante la sua teoria, in Malevich le forme geometriche trascendono i limiti del comunicabile per farsi manifesto di uno spirito a cui l'uomo può solo abbandonarsi mediante una disinteressata contemplazione, un illusorio tentativo di diventare un tutto unico con l'opera, di abbracciare la purezza della linea e l'accostamento dei colori. Mondrian, allo stesso modo, esprime una ricerca puramente spirituale, un continuo riassunto di linee e di forme che raggiunge il suo vertice nel momento in cui queste pretendono di essere lette secondo il ritmo di un ballo, e l'osservatore può solo stupirsi mentre il pittore svela quei fantasmi nascosti da tutto ciò che ci circonda per farci manifesti di un orizzonte sconfinato oltre il quale non riusciremo ad andare, la sua pittura comunica la fatica propria dell'uomo di cercare di superare il limite trascendentale.

Sotto una certa ottica, le opinioni di Adorno si intrecciano con quelle di Merleau-Ponty: entrambi riconoscono all'arte un ruolo estremamente importante, con la differenza che nel pensatore francese essa rientra in una dialettica del visibile e dell'invisibile legata alla carne e alla percezione, mentre è invece, per il filosofo francofortese, un punto focale nello sviluppo di una teoria critica della società e dei suoi consumi, ed in questo contesto è sottile quanto presente il confronto con l'opera di Duchamp e lo sviluppo delle tendenze informali: l'arte diventa una parte talmente integrante della nostra vita al punto che elaborarne una teoria, dispiegarne i vari motivi, trovarne un senso, è un compito per nulla arduo, impossibile a priori.

Il testo di Adorno è un tentativo sincero e di altissimo livello, seppur incompiuto, di svelare una parte inscindibile dell'esistenza e di valicarne quegli insormontabili limiti che richiedono pazienza e fatica per essere superati: chiunque si troverà spaesato in un lavoro del genere, bisogna solo accettare la sfida e lasciarsi travolgere dall'affascinante vortice dell'estetica.

Il carattere d'enigma è il brivido come ricordo, non come presenza in carne e ossa. (Paralipomena, p.387)

[Sebastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adorno didn't write books, he composed them. This book, though published posthumously, does justice to the perfectionism with which Adorno wrote.

Like his other writings and his music, it lacks a clear common thread. This is probably due to his rejection of a system that totalizes the work (a result of the traumas of the World Wars). This makes the book very difficult to understand and, consequently, to apply. This perhaps was intentional on Adorno's part. He probably wanted to prevent his work from falling into the clutches of "utilitarianism," and by writing in this manner, he freed it from easy criticism and simple summarization. So, I'm not offering a summary here, either.

To read this book, one must understand Adorno's thought, for which I recommend his "Negative Dialectics" and especially Simon Jarvis's "Adorno: A Critical Introduction." Without this context, this book will simply defeat any naive reader (like me) who dares to open its pages and simply read it like just another book.

However, in the end, the book's return on investment is low. It demands a lot of effort, and one can learn more about aesthetics from other sources. For me, Edmund Burke's "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" did the job. When I learned that it even influenced Kant's "Critique of Judgment," I knew that I had found what I was looking for: the source of our current ideas about aesthetics.

Nevertheless, I cannot deny that this is the best book on aesthetics written in the last century.

[K80 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Adorno and not just because he’s a grumpy old man like I am. There’s such depth and value to this perspective: that art should contain and sublate its own history, that it ought to be authentic, that monopoly capitalism inherently dichotomizes and weakens art by commercializing it while threatening its destruction.

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is dense, wordy and complex. Notoriously so! Its paratactic structure winds the arguments, renders them repetitive and (to steal a term from Hegel,) interpenetrating. But it’s also striking and compelling and beautiful and cuts straight to my heart.

I think Adorno would’ve liked Disco Elysium.

[Briary]

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory challenges us to rethink the nature of beauty—not as something static, but as a dynamic tension between form and content, autonomy and function. While rooted in high theory, its influence reaches far beyond galleries and literature.

In aesthetic medicine, this philosophical lens invites us to approach facial enhancement not as correction, but as interpretation. For educators exploring this intersection, high-fidelity facial injection training models provide a tangible way to examine structure, symmetry, and form.

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[Inez Yri]

Kom att tänka på denna när jag läste kundera i somras (en av många kitschhaters). Gud vad minns jag ens, minns ju det här med kitsch som estetikens förflackning, konstens autonomi och förmåga att stå emot påtryckningar, nånting om dialektik i konst memesis mening och typ så kulturindustrin förstör och det blir ganska jobbigt. Borde kanske läsa den igen

[Peter Vojtko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tough book. Took me a long time to finish(no pun intended). I agreed with Mr. Theodor on many things, some are just t0o br0ad to quantify. At least for me... Maybe I'm just a dummy, desperately trying to understand the monarchs of Frankfurt school.

[Iyanna Figueroa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really good book because it is just so relaxing to read. I would recommend this book too but have one to read have any other one to keep with you as an aesthetic décor. This is good to read on coumpter,ipad,phone, or your TV screen or the book that you can hand read .

[Foley Stocks]

Elsewhere Adorno had remarked on the type of listening compelled by Schoenberg’s music, where one ought to be willing to cast their ear into the dark, how the whole is needed to understand the part, etc. For all its strangeness, reading Adorno, and this text especially, feels much the same.

[Atonator187 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense. Plodding. Important. Adorno is tough. A lot of this is associative and seems like flights of fancy. But the gems of insight that come every 20-30 pages or so make this work crucial.