Quote

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Theodor Adorno

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Theodor Adorno
Success
Contradictions
Idea
Objective
Embodying
Art
Contradiction
Spurious
Ideas
Resolve
Resolves
Work
Harmony
Brainstorming
Thinking
Structure
Negatively
Pure
Innermost
Successful
Expresses

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

Image
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
Theodor Adorno
Image
The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
Theodor Adorno
Image
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.
Theodor Adorno
Image
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
Theodor Adorno
Image
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
Theodor Adorno
Image
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
Theodor Adorno
Image
He who integrates is lost.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.
Theodor Adorno
Image
It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.
Theodor Adorno