Discreet iconoclacy: Adorno and the "fate of art"

Abstract

The relationship between emancipation and art is close, but diverse. This paper will address this relationship from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno within the framework of the emancipatory positions of the Marxist tradition and its development around the fate or death of art. The artwork appears here as a bastion of emancipatory truth that awaits its moment of unfolding in society, but that neither under cultural dynamics nor through criticism can it express itself at the risk of becoming a manipulated truth, mere propaganda. It is the relationship of art with its own death that is postulated as an emancipatory possibility, and the role of knowledge lies in addressing this destruction of art without falling into tyrannical positions.