193ity is of course much more complicated. It is statements of this kind that have led
Adorno’s critics to accuse him of being an elitist, and in some ways they are right.
Adorno certainly did not have much of an eye for the inventive and critical use that
has been made of some of the products of mass culture in everyday practice. That,
however, does not mean that suggestions do not occur now and then in his work that
permit such material to be read as a form of cultural production that consists of more
than just commodification and the urge to conform.^95
Another consequence of his preference for autonomous works of art is that
he adopts a position that according to Peter Bürger is quite simply anti-avant-
gardist.^96 Adorno himself does not make any distinction between modernism and the
avant-garde, but if one concurs with Bürger’s line of argument and assumes that
what the avant-garde was concerned with was the abolition of the institution of
“art,” then it makes sense that Adorno could not go along with this aim. For him it is
clear that the distance between actual social reality and the promise of a different fu-
ture inherent in autonomous works of art is so great that there is no question of the
abolition of art being able to achieve the desired goal, namely genuine emancipation
and liberation. On the contrary, in Adorno’s view it is only by preserving its autonomy
that art can remain critical.
In my opinion, it is above all Adorno’s dual purpose as evidenced in Aesthetic
Theorythat gives his work its relevance today: the aim to see works of art in the per-
spective of their social definition and social relevance on the one hand (in other
words, in terms of their character as denouncing social reality) and on the other hand
in the perspective of their autonomy as aesthetically shaped objects. Adorno’s dual
definition of the work of art and the way in which he describes the mutual relation
between these two aspects remains in my mind a fascinating departure point for an-
alyzing specific works of art—or architecture.Mimesis in Architecture
It is by no means self-evident that architecture can be approached as a mimetic dis-
cipline. As long as one thinks of “mimesis” as a literal copying or imitation, as a de-
piction or reproduction of a given reality, it is difficult to discern its presence in
architecture. This is also the reason that Heidegger states in The Origin of the Work
of Artfor relying on the model of the Greek temple. In this text Heidegger attempts
to identify what is the essence of art; according to him, it has to do with truth, but not
with depiction or “representation”:We now ask the question of truth with a view to the work. But in order
to become more familiar with what the question involves, it is neces-
sary to make visible once more the happening of truth in the work. For
this attempt let us deliberately select a work that cannot be ranked as
representational art.
A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing.^97192