The Desartification of art according to Adorno:

background and resonances

Abstract

The theme of “desartifi cation of art” – one of the most original but also obscure, contributions of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory – is discussed in this paper on the basis of this author’s passages on the subject. Nevertheless, in spite of its specifi city in the Adornian aesthetics, the concept of desartifi cation presents a relation not only to the previous tradition of the philosophy of art, specially to the theme of the end of art at Hegel’s Courses of Aesthetics but also to its most recent developments such as Arthur Danto’s theory on contemporary (or post-historical) art. Thus the investigation of the theme of desartifi cation in Adorno is preceded here by a concise analysis of the Hegelian topic and followed by a brief presentation of the connected subject in Danto’s aesthetic.