O conceito de arte e desartificação da arte em adorno

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the concept of art and the process of de-artification in Theodor W. Adorno, elucidating their importance for the critique of the culture industry. Drawing on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer demonstrate how the Enlightenment project, by transforming reason into a technical instrument, converts culture into a commodity and human beings into objects of domination. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno conceives art as a “social antithesis,” a space of resistance to instrumental rationality and an expression of the negative of the world. Thus, aesthetic autonomy conceives art as a form of critical thought, capable of revealing historical contradictions and preserving the utopian promise of reconciliation between subject and nature. The notion of mimesis plays a central role by expressing a sensitive and non-dominating relationship with reality, restoring the repressed dimension of human experience. In his analysis of the culture industry, Adorno observes the conversion of culture and art into products and the standardization of taste, in which leisure becomes an extension of labor and art is reduced to entertainment. This process reveals the loss of negativity and the de-artification of art (Entkunstung der Kunst), the end of art—that is, its loss of autonomy and critical power in the face of market logic. For Theodor Adorno, art occupies a dialectical position, being simultaneously a form of resistance and a mirror of the social contradictions that engender it. Its authenticity is not defined merely by opposition to de- artified art, but by its ability to preserve negativity and confrontation with historical reality. Within this dialectical movement, the philosopher identifies the crisis of modern art, marked by the internal exhaustion of its forms. By questioning aesthetic formalism and the classical ideal of beauty, Adorno recognizes the phenomenon of de-artification, in which the autonomy of art weakens under the logic of the market. However, this crisis is not merely imposed from without: it also manifests within the very structures of art itself, whose relentless pursuit of formal innovation reveals the collapse of its historical languages and meanings.