File spoon-archives/baudrillard.archive/baudrillard_1999/baudrillard.9911, message 8


Date: Sun, 07 Nov 1999 14:56:51 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com>
Subject: adorno



All

Recently I have been reading Adorno's Aesthetic Theory - I would be most
interested in hearing some thoughts from people on the list arguing for the
advantages and disadvantages of Baudrillard's perspectives over Adorno's late
position.

This is quoted from Adorno's second section called 'situation'

"The need to take risks is actualized in the idea of the experimental, which
– in opposition to the image of the artists unconscious organic labor –
simultaneously transfer from science to art the conscious control over
materials. Currently official culture grants special funds to what it
mistrustfully, half hoping for failure, calls  artistic experimentation, thus
neutralizing it. Actually, art is now scarcely possible unless it does
experiment. The disproportion between established culture and the level of
productive forces has become blatant: What is internally consistent appears
to society at large as a bogus promissory note on the future, and art,
socially dispossessed, is in no way sure that it has any binding force of its
own. For the most part, experimentation takes shape as the testing of
possibilities, usually of types and species; it is therefore tends to degrade
the concrete work to a mere example: this one of the reasons for the aging of
new art. Certainly aesthetic means and ends cannot be separated, yet almost
by its concept of experimentation is primarily concerned with means and
content to leave the world waiting in vain for the ends. What is more, during
the last several decades the concept of experimentation has itself become
equivocal. If even as late as 1930 experimentation referred to efforts
filtered through critical consciousness in opposition to the continuation of
unreflected aesthetic practices, in the meantime the concept has acquired the
stipulation that work should have contents that are not foreseeable in the
process of production, that subjectively, the artist should be surprised by
the work that results. In this transformation of the concept of
experimentation, art becomes conscious of something that was always present
in it and was pointed out by Mallermé The artist’s imagination scarcely ever
completely encompassed what it brought forth….Adorno p37/8"

steve.devos



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