Art Escapes Criticism, or Adorno's Museum

Abstract

Art Escapes Criticism, or Adorno's Museum Catherine Lui (bio) The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better. —Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory Departures and Arrivals Theodor Adorno belongs to a generation of intellectuals who did not celebrate the pleasures provided by popular culture: as a consequence, he has been identified with a kind of elitist condescension that generations of academics have worked to overthrow. Being identified with elitism implied that one was consigned to a special dustbin of history reserved for embarrassing relics of Leftism gone wrong. Dancing upon the grave of the Frankfurt School may not be as popular as it once was, but for a while, it was a jubilatory activity. Adorno himself wrote about the inescapable conflict between elitist and amateur in the essay "Valéry Proust Museum," and in it, he shows remarkable sympathy for Proust's defense of bad taste and superficiality. In this essay, Adorno demonstrates that Valéry and Proust represent two perspectives on art that are "diametrically opposed, but not directed polemically against each other, nor in fact does either betray any acquaintance of the other."1 The difference between Valéry and Proust is irremediable: to travel the abyss that separates them is to venture onto the faultline that slices through the landscape of modernity. Both Proust and Valéry rebelled against the increasingly rational disposition of art objects, but like two prisoners plotting separate escapes from the prison house of modernity's contradictions, they did so without paying any attention to the efforts of the other. [End Page 217] In Adorno's essay, Valéry represents the unhappy elitist, and Proust the enthusiastic dilettante. Adorno demonstrates that for both these critics, pleasure is the point of departure in any discussion of art. Pleasure in art, or the pleasure of art, is inextricably linked to museums. The German word, "museal" [museum-like], has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. They testify to the neutralization of culture. Art treasures are hoarded in them and their market value leaves no room for the pleasure of looking at them. Nevertheless, that pleasure is dependent on the existence of museums.2 "Historical respect" is opposed to "the needs of the present": the respect of history institutionalizes and places the art object under quarantine, at a safe distance from the tensions of contemporary contradictions. Neutralized culture still has its pleasures. In Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, aesthetic pleasure is inextricably linked to a promise of happiness both evoked and renounced by the artwork, which bears the traces of its struggle with "the instinctual conflicts of its genesis."3 Moreover, realization of "historical respect" takes place as a disciplining of both art object and the museum goer: the latter is produced as a subject of the Enlightenment and a citizen of the nation-state, while the former is psychologized as an expression of individual creativity and agency. In this way, the museological art object underwrites modern individuality. According to Donald Preziosi, the disposition of works of art in museums participates in the endless construction and reconstruction of a model of individual agency—as an idealized image of secretive genius at work.4 Preziosi argues that the modern museum establishes the Kantian "aesthetic" as "a separate and distinguishable realm of cognition" and thus promotes an idealized realm of coherence and commensurability between the objects themselves. If we understand the art object in the museum as an "ideal vision" of the modern subject, then the museum goer is taught to assume the correct posture with regard to a continuum of models and ideals to which she may be compared. Like Preziosi, media theorist and historian Wolfgang Ernst [End Page 218] emphasizes the museum's relation to other Enlightenment institutions that aspired to display not only discreet objects but a new form of interrelatedness: "The category of the universal interrelation of things (nexus rerum universalis), borrowed from Enlightenment thinking, became temporalized in nineteenth-century...