The Death of Art?

Hegel and Adorno on Art

G. W. F Hegel

According to Hegel, art is a manifestation of truth, but this is at its most fulfilled only during the Greek civilization, which consisted in the art-religion or "Kunstreligion"; "Once the perfect content was manifested in perfect forms, the searching spirit turns away from this objectivity toward its own interior and shuns the former... its form has stopped to be the highest necessity for the spirit". Adorno agreed as well that only great music was possible during a limited phase of humanity, but added on to Hegel by stating that: "...the content could survive art in a society that had freed itself of the barbarism of its culture". 

This liberation of form brought others such as Arthur Danto and Gadamer to see this as a "liberation of art" and the beginning of true artistic sovereignty. Nowadays as we see, not only with aesthetics but with performance interpretation, conducting or composing, painting and sculpture, we have reached a point of historical limits; so much history rests on our shoulders that it is even harder to assert the final truth, for as arts keep growing and expanding, not necessarily in an accepted way, we will no longer be able to hold them within our hands, and like water, arts will fall due to their own expansion. A positivistic view would claim that we actually have more power than ever to unite all this information to achieve a common response, and this could definitely improve mankind´s artistic experience. 

Theodor W. Adorno

In reality, and taking the example of musical interpretation, the artist has become the served and is no longer a servant of the arts, forcing inactivity due to overdoses of technology and feeble personalities that treat art as if it should indeed be a secondary `option´ in a settled bourgeoise world full of musical massifications. I rather use the word "serve" not as a means of oppression but rather to enhance how music makes the artist feel thankful; as something aesthetically superior, and this the real artistic soul will indeed understand.  We no longer have to scrutinize the mysteries of art, for this age of information has freed the artworks so much, that no sort of coherent form is capable of existing, but rather a disintegration occupies its place. 

Thus, aesthetics have evolved so much due to this disintegration. Ugliness and disintegration of form are more than any other aspect of art in the need of an aesthetic explanation because they are not, and the artwork in itself does not have the capacity to survive with its own form, and therefore takes from the generosity of aesthetics and the reasoning of arts, in order to maintain their survival through time. For instance lets take Beethoven´s 9th Symphony, specially the choral movement, which even though analyzed up to be point of exhaustion, it does not provoke disagreement when we say it is one of the great masterpieces of humanity; it is, it exists in its own self. Of course other themes can be discussed in more depth, but what the symphony gives to us; its supremacy, is far beyond any aesthetic investigation. 

The more we know, the less we enjoy.