genre is not sufficient for distinctively successful art. Mere formula must be
worked through and overcome: in Pound’s phrase, the artist must“make it
new,”must find new possibilities of subject matter, formal handling, and
emotional expression within a tradition or genre, if distinctively human
powers of free meaning-making are to be exercised and appreciated. This
imperative pushes artistic production increasingly toward abstraction and
conceptual innovation, against what craft alone enables. Modern art becomes
“abstract by virtue of its relation to what is past; irreconcilable with magic, it
is unable to speak what has yet to be, and yet must seek it, protesting against
the ignominy of the ever-same.”^35
The point of protesting in artistic work against the ignominy of the ever-
same is concretely and specifically to remind ourselves that our lives can be
more than mere repetitions, that they can themselves be media of free and
satisfying meaning-making, at least in principle and prospect. Instead of
doing just this or that, again, as it has always been done, we can make objects
and shape our lives freely and with full emotional investment. We need not
succumb to lives of silent melancholy and quiet desperation. The making of
original art is an anticipation and promise of original making in life more
generally. As Adorno puts it,“the new is the aesthetic soul of expanded
reproduction [of social life], with its promise of undiminished plenitude...
Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth
another world...Thus, however tragic they appear, artworks tenda priori
toward affirmation.”^36
Adorno, to repeat, overstates his points in tending to present craft, genre
membership, and location within an artistic tradition as incompatible with
originality, rather than in principle compatible with it but insufficient for it,
and hence in tending to defend an esoteric, iconoclastic modernism.
He remarks, for example, on“the decline of aesthetic genres as such.”^37
Yet – especially in his later views about historical developments in
music–he does elsewhere concede that original works of art must take
inherited materials and strategies as points of departure.^38
(^35) Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, p. 22. See also on the development of increasing abstraction in
music Dahlhaus,Idea of Absolute Music.
(^36) Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, pp. 21, 1. (^37) Ibid., p. 199.
(^38) See Adorno,“Reaktion und Fortschritt,”Anbruch6, 12 ( June 1930), cited in Max Paddison,
Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music(Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 88.
Originality and imagination 125