perhaps chanting and remembering the deeds of ancestors–is centrally part
of the sustaining of life in tribal communities. These objects and images and
sounds and words are used magically to invoke higher powers, reinforce
commitment, and maintain common focus and discipline. As the making
of these objects, and also of utilitarian objects such as pots and cloth, goes on,
however, it surely becomes evident that some of the objects thus made are
especially striking and that certain individuals are specially apt at this
making. Practices of training in the making of cultic objects develop, as can
still be seen in the training of New Guinea totem carvers. Somewhere in the
course of these developments, pride in and attention to the making of
distinctive form as itself a valuable achievement–apart from the use of
any object, image, or sound to fulfill a cultic function–comes to the fore. In
monitoring their own products and the products of others, people begin to
admire this achieved image or look or sound as itself an achievement of art.
People begin to take pride in achieving this striking form or image, or to
admire that configuration of rhythm. A sense of the development and sig-
nificance of form-making power dawns. The exercise of form-making power
for its own sake comes to be seen as a valuable instancing of a human
capability for free meaning-making. The modern system of the fine and high
arts that develops in the early seventeenth century is an outgrowth and
refinement of an earlier sense of artistic making and its significance, as
certain media–music, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, dance, and archi-
tecture–are seen to offer specially powerful possibilities for the making of
forms in which human powers of making can be displayed for their own sake
and pride can be taken directly in their exercise. But surely some sense of
these powers is present in any human culture, woven through its produc-
tions of cultic and utilitarian objects.
Distinctively artistic practice, then, emerges out of cultic and utilitarian
production when pride in powers of the making of new meaningful forms
becomes relatively foregrounded, in a progressive and never quite complete
development. Adorno is describing the results of this foregrounding when he
remarks that“only artworks that are to be sensed as a form of comportment
[Verhaltensweise] have araison d’être.”^32 The making of art, that is to say,
exemplifies free meaning-making. Adorno overstates the point somewhat,
in that meaning-making never becomes entirely free and for its own sake,
(^32) Ibid., p. 12.
Originality and imagination 123