Theodor Adorno Quotes on Art

11 quotes

2. 'Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.'

13. 'Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.'

14. 'Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.'

22. 'Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.'

24. 'Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.'

39. 'Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.'

50. 'In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.'

73. 'Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.'

79. 'Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme, and realize themselves in their resultant downfall.'

96. 'The ideology of cultural conservatism which sees enlightenment and art as simple antitheses is false, among other reasons, in overlooking the moment of enlightenment in the genesis of beauty. Enlightenment does not merely dissolve all the qualities that beauty adheres to, but posits the quality of beauty in the first place.'

112. 'The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.'

All Theodor Adorno quotes