Theodor Adorno Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Crime, Uncommitted

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.41, Univ of California Press

• Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

  Theodor Adorno

  Inspirational, Life, Art

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.222, Verso

• Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, States, Mass

• Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Writing, Suffering

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Order, Design

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.222, Verso

• There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Suffering, Way

• A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

  Theodor Adorno

  Success, Art, Thinking

  "Essays on Music".

• The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Order, Tasks

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.222, Verso

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Survival, Different

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.132, MIT Press

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Domination, Folks

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.204, Verso

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Reality, Becoming

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.132, MIT Press

• The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Self, Law

  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.19, Verso

• Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Social, Art Is

  Theodor W. Adorno (2013). “Aesthetic Theory”, p.9, A&C Black

• Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Broken, Creation

• Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Poetry, Way

• In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Doe, Facts

• Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Emotional, Effort

• It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Men, Office

• The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Kitsch, Imitation

  Theodor W. Adorno, Richard D. Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno ; Selected, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Leppert ; New Translations by Susan H. Gillespie”, p.364, Univ of California Press

• The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, World, Rational

  Theodor W. Adorno (2013). “Aesthetic Theory”, p.27, A&C Black

• The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Men, Form

  Theodor W. Adorno (2014). “Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata”, p.236, John Wiley & Sons

• Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Relation, Inner Life

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