opposite must be the case in true aesthetics. It must absorb precisely those objections
which it once raised in principle against all artists. Aesthetics would condemn itself if it
continued unreflectively, speculatively, without relentless self-criticism. Aesthetics as an
integral facet of philosophy awaits a new impulse which must come from reflective
efforts. Hence recent artistic praxis has turned to aesthetics. Aesthetics becomes a
practical necessity once it becomes clear that concepts like usefulness and uselessness in
art, like the separation of autonomous and purpose-oriented art, imagination and
ornament, must once again be discussed before the artist can act positively or negatively
according to such categories. Whether you like it or not, you are being pushed daily to
considerations, aesthetic considerations, which transcend your immediate tasks. Your
experience calls Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain to mind, who discovers to his amazement
in studying rhetoric that he has been speaking prose for his entire life. Once your activity
compels you to aesthetic considerations, you deliver yourself up to its power. You can no
longer break off and conjure up ideas arbitrarily in the name of pure and thorough
expertise. The artist who does not pursue aesthetic thought energetically tends to lapse
into dilettantish hypothesis and groping justifications for the sake of defending his own
intellectual construct. In music, Pierre Boulez, one of the most technically competent
contemporary composers, extended constructivism to its extreme in some of his
compositions; subsequently, however, he emphatically announced the necessity of
aesthetics. Such an aesthetics would not presume to herald principles which establish the
key to beauty or ugliness itself. This discretion alone would place the problem of
ornament in a new light. Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to
which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and
overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them. Mere formal beauty,
whatever that might be, is empty and meaningless; the beauty of its content is lost in the
preartistic sensual pleasure of the observer. Beauty is either the resultant of force vectors
or it is nothing at all. A modified aesthetics would outline its own object with increasing
clarity as it would begin to feel more intensely the need to investigate it. Unlike
traditional aesthetics, it would not necessarily view the concept of art as its given
correlate. Aesthetic thought today must surpass art by thinking art. It would thereby
surpass the current opposition of purposeful and purpose-free, under which the producer
must suffer as much as the observer.
NOTES
1 The Neue Sachlichkeit movement, one of the main post-expressionist trends in German art, is
commonly translated as ‘New Objectivity’. The word sachlich, however, carries a series of
connotations. Along with its emphasis on the ‘thing’ (Sache) it implies a frame of mind of
being ‘matter of fact’, ‘down to earth’.
2 See Adolf Loos, Sämtliche Schriften, I, Franz Glück (ed.), Vienna/Munich, 1962, p. 314 ff.
3 Gerechtigkeit implies not just ‘fittingness’ or ‘appropriateness’, but even a stronger legal or
moral ‘justice’.
4 The word Zweck appears throughout Adorno’s speech, both alone and in various
combinations. It permeates the tradition of German aesthetics since Kant. While it basically
means ‘purpose’, it must sometimes be rendered in English as ‘goal’ or ‘end’ (as in ‘means
and end’, Mittel und Zweck). Hence there is a certain consistency in Adorno’s use of the
word which cannot always be maintained in English.Theodor W.Adorno 17