Theodor Adorno Quotes About Art

We have collected for you the TOP of Theodor Adorno's best quotes about Art! Here are collected all the quotes about Art starting from the birthday of the Sociologist – September 11, 1903! We hope you will be inspired to new achievements with our constantly updated collection of quotes. At the moment, this page contains 22 sayings of Theodor Adorno about Art. We will be happy if you share our collection of quotes with your friends on social networks!
  • 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.

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

    Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.132, MIT Press
  • The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

    Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.222, Verso
  • Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

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

    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  • The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.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 W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.19, Verso
  • Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

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

  • Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

    Theodor W. Adorno (2013). “Aesthetic Theory”, p.9, A&C Black
  • 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 W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.132, MIT Press
  • The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

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

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

    Theodor W. Adorno (2014). “Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata”, p.236, John Wiley & Sons
  • Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

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

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

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

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

    Theodor W. Adorno (2013). “Aesthetic Theory”, p.27, A&C Black
Page 1 of 1
Did you find Theodor Adorno's interesting saying about Art? We will be glad if you share the quote with your friends on social networks! This page contains Sociologist quotes from Sociologist Theodor Adorno about Art collected since September 11, 1903! Come back to us again – we are constantly replenishing our collection of quotes so that you can always find inspiration by reading a quote from one or another author!