But what does it mean when we say art is “critical”?

Interviewee: Roger Behrens

Today art is still understood in the sense of a “work aesthetic”, but that’s just ideology, part of the spectacle of the art scene. Contemporary art, including the “political” art operating within contemporary art, can no longer produce “works”; artworks are no longer artworks. But Adorno’s thinking is still based on works of art, and that’s why he hardly has anything to say about contemporary art – fully aware that it is effectively a total “de-arting of art”. But what does it mean in the context of the autonomous artwork when we say art is “critical”? The “critical” in a work of art is its “knowledge character”: it renders a “truth” discernible. This truth is embedded in art, crystallised in the work – Adorno and Benjamin call it the “temporal core of truth”. Tightly and thoroughly composed, works have an immanent, inherent, coherent, consistent structure. It is in this structure that the temporal core of truth is embedded – and, by the way, “temporal core” means that the work itself is historical, but also historically transitory: the truth absconds…for Adorno, what is needed to extract this temporal core, to grasp the truth, is the possibility of unregimented experience.