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This text on aesthetics includes major sections on: Art, Society, Aesthetics; the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, the Technics; Natural Beauty; Coherence and Subject-Object; and Towards a Theory of the Artwork. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Antidote to Mass Culture of shallowness
This is an uncompromising reminder that art is not decoration, or popular culture, it is far most profound, and that our narrow perspective on the world structured by our ecstatic media frenzied mass culture is a false and brief illusion.
Adorno reaches accross centuries to find the importance of art in human endeavor and development, how art is part of articulating these and essential to historical progress.
I dont want to get into reviewing his text, I am not capable critiquing it, and other reviews have placed it in the historical/intellectual context. I dont know of any serious thinker in the last century that invested so much thought into the aesthethic philosophy of modernity, thus I find the ultimate philosophical text on modern art. For me Adorno's position hinges on his critique of catharsis as an unacheivable condition of modernity.
It is a refreshing and motivating book to withstand and overcome all the misinformation that is thrown at us constantly and irresposibly. His examples are mostly from music so it is much more abstract than the visual arts examples of most art theory. A must for anyone that really cares about art. I dare you to read this and go to some trendy galleries afterwards. I say this because it will make you see right trhough all the pretense, and long for the real, the universal, the historically significant workamd rediscover it.

A pyramidal corpus of smart ideas!
"The darkening of the world makes rational the irrational in art: it's an irrationality radically obscured". "The art doesn't imitate neither the nature nor to a concrete natural beauty, but the natural beauty by itself." "The efforts of the art by saving, in the remaining, all the transient, flowing and temporal, defending it from the stuffingthough art is familiarized with it, bear a tension between the objectifying technique and the mimetic essence of the works."

"Aesthetical theory" is a huge compendium of smart ideas, a whole corpus of clever and revealing concepts about the role of the art. His architectural intelligence and supreme erudition literally is an engaging tour de force, an impressive gallery of sharp reflections that will motivate you, dear reader.

Since I acquired it, this book has become one of my cult texts, whose relevant importance remains beyond any other superlative you want to label it.

The definite book of modernist aesthetics
Adorno is not famous for his writing style. His prose is dense, and sometimes impenetrable for the English reader. Yet, I think Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is one of the greatest books of XX century philosophy along with Heidegger's "Being and Time", and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I think there are three levels of reflection in this book. The first is that AT is a sociology of art. Adorno traces the social and economic conditions of how modern art becomes to being. Industrialization and modernization have a great impact on aesthetics because perception and reality are fundamentally altered. Adorno makes the case that the destruction of nature by industry makes art to find its reality elsewhere and, hence, it becomes abstract. Art does not want to imitate nature anymore since nature is already destroyed. It escapes to the realm of idea(l)s in order to critique the current state of being. The critical nature of modern art makes for the second level of Adorno's reading which is the aesthetic. Aesthetics in modernism becomes an instrument of social critique. Before, in the time of Kant and the idealists, aesthetic was the study of beauty and artistic genius. Now, according to Adorno, it becomes the study of social disintegration in which the artist is just the "unfortunate" medium to express it. Yet, Adorno is not a complete pessimist. (Although his arrogance and snobbery concerning "lower" popular art is of the worst kind. His favorite artists are the European ultra-elite: Mahler, Kafka, Schonberg). He sees in aesthetic reflection a tool for utopian transformation. This is the third level of reading AT -the philosophical or utopian. Modern art, because it critiques this world for the sake of a better one, is also philosophy. Since philosophy was the discipline that established how the real and ideal are separated, modern art also shows this gap, and treats beauty as a poor substitute for happiness. Beauty, once idealized by the elite, becomes a sign of the powerlessness of art to transform the world. This impotence, still, is a sign of art's utopian power. This kind of paradoxical reasoning is typical of Adorno, and it is loaded with theological significance. Art promises something that cannot be delivered, but who delivers then?

so what
If he doesn't like Curtis Mayfield.Should he?

Fundamentally The Intellectual Equivalent of White Flight
I do not understand Adorno's fame or appeal. The consequences--witting or unwitting--of many of his ideas are frighteningly inhuman. This is to speak only of the ideas I found scrutable.But really, the parts I didn't understand could have been a map to the unattended cook's entrance of Heaven; but it would not mitigate that which concerned me most about what I DID understand.
No offense to the Schoenberg estate, and no offense to those who enjoy experimentations with tonality, but to my sensibility the elevation of Arnold Schoenberg to aesthetic eminence just seems representative of the lengths to which many will go to avoid thinking about black traditions in art, literature and music. Adorno's music writings insist that only classical music might liberate us from the pull of ideology and/or 'mere' existence.It offends me that a man who will not even try to appreciate Coltrane's A LOVE SUPREME--and moreover a man who would immediately equate said album to one of the means by which we maintain and spread cultural sickness--insists that he has navigated some sort of means for salvation to which we all should turn.
Not being grossly essentialist, I would expand the concept of 'black' within this context to mean "people who do not insist on the idea that resentment and worldweariness are ontic categories and/or define these traits as, to use K. Burke's term, 'necessary equipment for living'."This means that each of us can escape Adorno's grasp.Let's consider: Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed by an accident backstage during a concert venue.He could not move below the neck.For the rest of his years he persevered, making one more album.Adorno, on the other hand, escaped the Final Solution, then returned to Germany for the rest of his life.For most of the time, he enjoyed not a little comfort.And yet somehow Adorno was melancholy, almost comically so.Mayfield made music Adorno couldn't understand.Was the humanity of Mayfield's perseverence something Adorno couldn't understand as well?
If black world traditions of music, art, speech etc. were just as advertised--traditions--shouldn't many of us develop a useful understanding of those traditions? (Or could we at least recognize the courage of Fela Kuti and Adorno's failure to match up?)The task does not even seem particularly difficult, yet the rewards are great.Yes, many times more people will 'understand' pieces within these traditions than people would 'understand' a piece by Schoenberg.But the summitt of the former, I am certain, towers over the summitt of the latter.
It would behoove us to address the reasons that Adorno's work is scoured day and night, with the intent purpose of locating 'genius.'And it behooves us as well to investigate into why the semantic vagaries of a term like "tha bomb" renders the same scavenger hunters for Adorno totally lost.It is noted about Adorno's book that paragraphing and cohesion and coherence are abandoned, forgotten or arranged idiosyncratically so as to instigate some kind of paradigmatic challenge, apparently.But minimal immersion within a vernacular culture would provide any student with the means of vernacular comprehension and comfort, if not vernacular mastery.Adorno's supporters strain for any act or utterance from Adorno to have profound meaning.A short survey of vernacular urban culture, for example, would provide a wealth of possibility for finding profound meaning.No strain, but a fair, competent consideration of many aspects of vernacular urban culture will reveal clearly the wealth of possibilities within that culture.Why insist on the insistence of genius?Why accept, especially, a flat denial of art's social value or social nature, in a way that always places Adorno's aesthetic theory in a position of strength compared to more 'grounded' ones?Doesn't this automatic suspicion help to hide the excesses of the idea of ideological contamination and underpinnings?
Finally, consider two victims of the Nazis: Bruno Schulz and J. Huizenga.Schulz' comic outrageousness still inspires; Huizenga made the perceptive argument that man is by nature 'one who plays,' and that that was the best way to understand ourselves and to liberate ourselves.The Nazis killed these two.But is not, in a fundamental way, Adorno, who, in his declaration that, "There is no poetry after Auschwitz," reduces those two to ash and dust?To proscribe such essential ways to see the world with love, hope, and the possibility of one's agency, in the name of theory or aesthetics, is to me something that cannot be defended.Adorno did not fall then.Neither did he risk falling: he had escaped to LA.Yet he felt it imperative to strip certain sensibilities from our psyche, sensibilities that might get us over such attempts to destroy humanity as the Final Solution.Has Adorno stooped to a level of 'inhumanity'?In some real way, his concepts of ideology and classical music in effect see his brethren who enjoyed Klezmer music as getting what should be expected: victims of ideology are victimized to the last. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Explosive, enigmatic, indispensable
Gillian Rose was one of the most enigmatic thinkers of postmodernity, although she was avowedly a staunch opponent of the philosophy of anti-rationalism which she recognized in the academic climate of her time. This book is not intended for the lay reader. It was published in 1978 and it is steeped in a Jewish dialectical engagement with proto-Marxism and Modernism. The reviewer above does an excellent job in unveiling the portent latency of the "introdction" and its intimate relationship with thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lukaks, Benjamin and Levinas whose theoretical assumptions and methodologies are presumed as veersed. It bears remembering that when this publication went in print there were only a handful of readers of Adorno and hardly any studies on the founder of the Frankfurt Institute, while he had yet to publish his greatest work. Because of it this should not bear the title "introduction" in the sense of invitation rather it is more of a prelogomena, where ideas are diffused, refracted and intimated. This today remains a book of astounding interest to the scholars of Jewish and proto-modern thought because it expounds the philosophy and the politics of a thinker who has been considered inconsistent and reactionary, subtle but intimidating, against the grain and unconvincing.
Rose was at once captured and horrified by modernity. She rejected the postmodern as diffuse and irresponsible, but she regretted the "broken middle" of modernity and attacked most of the leading thinkers in the Jewish world as being much too enamored of both autonomy and modernity. She used a personal neo-Kantian critique to unmask the naive belief in modernity that most philosophers and, perhaps especially, Jewish philosophers cannot surrender.

Rose wrote her dissertation on Theodor Adorno under Leszek Kolakowski who hated him. Rose was moved by the Frankfurt School's melancholy activism, which scrupulously avoided both pessimism and enthusiasm. She ultimately found Adorno too "abstract" for her taste and turned to Hegel whom she also came to abandon, despite her initial preference for left-Hegelianism against an apparently dying neo-Kantianism. She offered a friendly critique of Marx, whom she took very seriously, though she found him wanting in an "ethical realism." She turned her most lethal guns against the French deconstructionists Derrida and Foucault whom she decried as "fantastic, Oriental and Hebraic" in the sense of indeterminate, irrational, and undemonstrable. Kirkegaard became a standard by which to refute the deconstructionists since he "refuses to imply that love and law, commandment and coercion can be separated."

Martin Jay helps us to see Rose as a philosopher of love, in both the erotic and in the Christian, agapic sense. She related love and violence more profoundly than did Rene Girard and his epigones. Violence for Rose means "risk, language, labor, love" a crucial task of living with an idea or person before we historicize. She rejects Walter Benjamin's famous reliance on the Jewish concept of memory, which, as she believes, "puts eschatological repetition in the place of political judgment." The eclipse of Jewish politics is one of her constant regrets. Modernity has given the Jews a sterile alternative of memory or ideology in place of the authentically and indispensably Jewish political.

Rose opposed human pretension to the truth, a false faith in "unrevealed revelation" a neo-Protestant belief that is "hedonist, not ascetic, voluptuous not austere, embellished not plain, it devotes us to our own individual inner-worldly authority, but with the loss of the inner as well as the outer mediator. This is an ethic without ethics, a religion without salvation."
She contended that the enlightenment accorded the gestation of an "unrevealed religion," the assumption of an immanent god who makes truth available to us all. She was highly critical of such an ethical matrix.

Gillian Rose's story is a tragic one. She died too young, at 42 after a slow and debilitating bout with ovarian cancer. She could not finish her self-appointed task. She found Judaism insufficient to calm her restless spirit and on her death bed converted to Anglicanism. She walked a lonely, perhaps forever a unique path. Her work is not aesthetic, only deeply felt. Her conclusions are often highly debatable.

Rose's brand of Marxist no longer appears dated today. She had understood marxism as most of her interlocutors had characterized it as being anachronistic. Rose held to Lukács's tenet that Marxism is a `method' of philosophizing rather than a fixed doctrine. It is guided only by the goal of achieving a fully mutual social subjectivity. Therefore each generation has to reinvent the `method' for itself and apply it to the conditions of its own age. However Rose's thought lacks a coherent Critical Marxist project, its maturation blighted by her untimely death.

The book a Melancholy Science discusses Adorno's social theory, for Rose was predominantly a Sociologist (held a post in Sociology at the University of Sussex), and through her reading of "negaive Dialectics" and The Authoritarian Personality" explicates the controversies Adorno kept with Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin over reification and the Marxist theory of culture.

The book runs the gamut of Adorno's lifelong interests from philosophy to sociology, from literature to Music to illustrate that Adorno's Melancholy Science offers a sociology of illusion which rivals both structural Marxism and phenomenological sociology, as well as the subsequent work of the Frankfurt School.

A recent publication by Lambert Zuidervaart "Social Philosophy After Adorno" completely ignores this unique exposition of Adorno's social politics and ethical resonance. It has become a work that even the best scholars dismiss (although I have no doubt Zuidervaart is familiar with it), but one that has a recognition of agency that struggles and that by virtue of its violent dirumption becomes a fussion of sorts that explodes the dialectic of nihilism to her so particularly imposing.

This remains a necessary work to understand the work of Adorno, the intellectual climate he worked within and most importantly the fervour that incident to its provisions internalizes the loss and melancholy of the intellect as it rummages through the remains of a catastrophe Gillian Rose would not admit as prescriptive. A work of love in the vain of the best Adorno or Benjamin. Get a hold of it while there are still copies available in those used bookstores that support the archeology of knowledge and the anthropology of the soul as it corroberates its own void by ethereal wisdom that is both sublime and beautiful.

- Some of the information above gathered from "The Tragedy of Gillian Rose by Arnold Jacob Wolf -

Interesting Reading, though Geared Towards Academics
The experience I had with Gillian Rose's _The Melancholy Science_ was generally one of misunderstanding and frustration.The primary complaint I have with the work is that does not serve its purpose as an "introduction" to Adorno's philosophy.Instead, it is geared towards the well-seasoned undergraduate or graduate philosophy/sociology student.While I was interested in philosophy at university, it was not my major and I did not take more than a few courses in it.This hardly provided the foundation for understanding modern, complex texts that make use of the past two milleniums worth of thought.I am, at best, an "armchair philosopher," and this is the position in which I review Rose's work.
Hoping _The Melancholy Science_ would help me better understand the intricacies of a thinker I am currently interested in, I found the exposition on the thought of Adorno to be anything but an introduction.While I was never expecting to have my "hand held" through the inevitably deep ridges of Adorno's thought, my impression was that his main views would be examined in relatively straightforward (that is, somewhat un-academic) language and bring in references to others when necessary.
Rose, however, expects the reader to be relatively familiar with most of Adorno's predecessors: Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkagaard, Benjamin, Lukacs, Weber, etc. and their terminology.This may be an unavoidable form of presentation, since Adorno grounded his philosophy heavily in response to other's thoughts (he seems to have been a reactionary thinker as much as a creative one), but it still strikes me as strange that a book about Adorno features more delineation on the views of others than Adorno.
Commentary about Adorno's thoughts are nestled inbetween paragraphs concerning the aforementioned thinkers, often a brief paragraph linking two larger ones on someone else's views.Occasionally, these insights that Rose offers are interesting and helpful (such as her attempt to instruct one how to read Adorno and what his method of writing was) at times, while difficult to understand or relate to previously mentioned thinkers' ideas at others.
The work would also benefit from better proofreading and editing (for example, several times throughout the work, parallel sentences begin with the same overused introductory method: 'on the other hand', 'to begin with', etc. and there are numerous grammatical errors).

Essentially, the work is to be read by experienced philosophers and sociologists who are familiar with those that contributed to Adorno's thought and understand the major arguments and situations of his day.This is not a title for neophytes to Adorno or the Frankfurt School - indeed, if I hadn't read anything by or of Adorno beforehand, I would have been completely lost.Perhaps the Frankfurt School Reader better serves this goal. ... Read more

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"Just as Robert Hullot-Kentor's new translations of Adorno's main works are a stroke of good fortune for philosophical literature, in hisThings Beyond Resemblance he presents completely new and altogether original aspects of Adorno's thought. Here, under the optic of the artist, Adorno's philosophy once again begins to breathe; indeed, the philosopher and philologist that Hullot-Kentor equally is, gives voice to Adorno's aesthetics and its own often artistic prose. This occurs most astoundingly, however, when the American author undertakes to comprehend the current political and social situation of his country in the concepts and theories of the German philosopher and thus demonstrates beyond any doubt Adorno's undiminished contemporary import." -- Rolf Tiedemann, director emeritus of the T.W. Adorno-Archive, Frankfurt, and editor of T.W. Adorno'sCollected Writings

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A collection of 33 essays reflecting the role of music in German theories of national identity and the importance of music theory in German thought. Includes essays by Thomas Mann, Immanuel Kant, Max Weber, and Bertolt Brecht. Includes notes on the authors. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Port ... Read more

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"Quasi Una Fantasia" contains Adorno's own selection from his essays and journalism over more than three decades. In its analytical profundity it can be compared to his "Philosophy of Modern Music" or his monograms on Berg, Mahler and Wagner. Its themes and references range from Mozart to Boulez, the minuet to the jitterbug. At the book's core are studies of the founders of modern music: Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, as well as sympathetic rediscoveries of Zemlinsky and Schreker. Especially significant is Adorno's "dialectical portrait" of Stravinsky, in which he refines the damning indictment he gave in "Philosophy of Modern Music". In "Vers une musique informelle" he plots a course for a music of the future" which could take up the challenge of an unrevised, unrestricted freedom". More unexpecedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, such as Bizet's "Carmen" and Weber's "Der Freischutz", along with "Natural History of the Theatre", which explores the rituals and hierarchies of the auditorium, from dress circle to foyer. Musical kitsch, be it Gounod's "Ave Maria" or the "Penny Serenade", is the target of several of the shorter pieces.Yet even while Adorno demolishes "commodity music" he is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it. ... Read more

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"Quasi Una Fantasia" contains Adorno's own selection from his essays and journalism over more than three decades. In its analytical profundity it can be compared to his "Philosophy of Modern Music" or his monograms on Berg, Mahler and Wagner. Its themes and references range from Mozart to Boulez, the minuet to the jitterbug. At the book's core are studies of the founders of modern music: Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, as well as sympathetic rediscoveries of Zemlinsky and Schreker. Especially significant is Adorno's "dialectical portrait" of Stravinsky, in which he refines the damning indictment he gave in "Philosophy of Modern Music". In "Vers une musique informelle" he plots a course for a music of the future" which could take up the challenge of an unrevised, unrestricted freedom". More unexpecedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, such as Bizet's "Carmen" and Weber's "Der Freischutz", along with "Natural History of the Theatre", which explores the rituals and hierarchies of the auditorium, from dress circle to foyer. Musical kitsch, be it Gounod's "Ave Maria" or the "Penny Serenade", is the target of several of the shorter pieces.Yet even while Adorno demolishes "commodity music" he is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it. ... Read more

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'My dears: this is but a brief note to welcome you to the new world, where you are now no longer all too far away from us. ' So begins Adorno's letter to his parents in May 1939, welcoming them to Cuba where they had just arrived after fleeing from Nazi Germany at the last minute. At the end of 1939 his parents moved again to Florida and then to New York, where they lived from August 1940 until the end of their lives. It is only with Adorno's move to California at the end of 1941 that his letters to his parents start arriving once more, reporting on work and living conditions as well as on friends, acquaintances and the Hollywood stars of his time. One finds reports of his collaborations with Max Horkheimer, Thomas Mann and Hanns Eisler alongside accounts of parties, clowning around with Charlie Chaplin, and ill-fated love affairs. But the letters also show his constant longing for Europe: Adorno already began to think about his return as soon as the USA entered the war.

Adorno's letters to his parents - surely the most open and direct letters he ever wrote - not only afford the reader a glimpse of the experiences that gave rise to the famous Minima Moralia, but also show Adorno from a previously unknown, very personal side. They end with the first reports from the ravaged Frankfurt to his mother - who remained in New York - and from Amorbach, Adorno's childhood paradise ... Read more