independently of other psychological, social, economic, utilitarian, and so
forth motives. Works of art that have decorative, liturgical, and utilitarian
functions surely do have a raison d’être. The worthwhile point that is
embodied in Adorno’s remark, however, is that attention to meaning-making
for its own sake, in the forming of wood, paint, clay, stone, sound, or words,
is a defining aim of practice that can be recognized as artistic, over and above
or in addition to being a practice of either utilitarian or cultic making.
Through free meaning-making, distinctively human powers of envisioning
and shaping for the sake of eye and ear in conjunction with the mind are
exercised and appreciated. As Adorno puts it,“The autonomy [art] achieved,
after having freed itself from cultic function and its images, was nourished
by the idea of humanity”^33 as the locus of the free making of forms and
meanings.
In order, then, for distinctively human powers of free meaning-making to
continue to be exercised and appreciated, newness must be pursued. If a
work is instead made as a repetition, according to plan, and with the satis-
faction of either some utilitarian need or cultic function comparatively
foregrounded, then the exercise and appreciation of powers of free
meaning-making are foregone. Particularly in opposition to the manufac-
tured commodity, where each unit–each pin or plate or automobile–is
immediately fungible with any other of like manufacture, the work of art
must be new. Even the copying or immediate repetition of prior art (as
opposed to being inspired to new production by the power of form-making
that prior art manifests) will result in something other than art. As Adorno
puts it,“art must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and
thus become uncertain of itself, right into its innermost fibre.”^34 Again the
point is overstated, as Adorno argues for a hypermodernism;contraAdorno,
there can be practices of making works of art that form a tradition, and
works of art can and typically are made within genres, not as outbursts of
pure iconoclasm. But Adorno is right that being made within a tradition or(^33) Ibid., p. 1.
(^34) Ibid., p. 2. Adorno makes a similar point about the importance of the free making of
meaning in philosophy, which must, like art, pursue“non-identity thinking”or“open
thinking.”On“open thinking”that“points beyond itself”see Theodor Adorno,“Resig-
nation,”Telos35 (spring 1968), p. 168; on nonidentity thinking see Theodor Adorno,
Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), especially
part 2,“Negative Dialectics. Concept and Categories,”pp. 135–207.
124 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art