An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

creative making of centrally successful art must take up and express what

people in a culture most deeply care about, the task of doing this is not made

straightforward by a governing logic of the development of cares in cultures.

Individual makers of art will have more to do in order to identify, assess, and

develop certain threads of care and commitment than Hegel supposes.

Instead of thinking as Hegel does of centrally successful art as essentially

illustrative of cares and commitments that might better be understood

otherwise (for example, philosophically or philosophico-historically), we

might better think of the work of genius as, in Stanley Cavell’s phrase, the

enactment of“the promise that the private [what I or a few care about] and

the social [what we care about] will be achieved together”^29 – in the face of

continuing obscurities and difficulties that trouble such enactments.“The

problem...of the artist is not to discount his subjectivity, but to master it in

exemplary ways. Then his work outlasts the fashions and arguments of a

particular age. That is the beauty of it.”^30

Why originality matters: Adorno on free meaning-making

How and why might anyone come to wish to produce work that outlasts the

fashions and arguments of a particular age? How and why might originality

in the making of forms that represent subject matters about which commu-

nities care deeply and that express attitudes toward those subjects come to

matter“for its own sake”?

The practice of making art does not begin historically from any individual

intention alone. It arises out of practices of the making of both immediately

useful objects and objects for ritual-liturgical purposes. (Recall Nietzsche’s

account of the birth of tragedy, considered in Chapter 1.) In Adorno’s formu-

lation,“in the most authentic works the authority that cultic objects were

once meant to exercise over thegentesbecame the immanent law of form.”^31

Initially, that is to say, the making of certain objects and images and sounds–

perhaps the cave paintings at Lascaux; perhaps the decorated and costumed

bodies of those preparing for war or the hunt; perhaps ritualized drumming;

(^29) Stanley Cavell,“Being Odd, Getting Even,”in S. Cavell,In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of
Skepticism and Romanticism(University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 105–49 at p. 114.
(^30) Cavell,“Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,”pp. 73–96 at p. 94.
(^31) Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, p. 17.
122 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art