Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism

Thijs Lijster teaches philosophy of art at the University of Groningen. He contributed to Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (eds. R. Sonderegger and K. De Boer, Palgrave 2012), Institutional Attitudes. Instituting Art in a Flat World (ed. P. Gielen, Valiz 2013) and The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd edition (ed. M. Kelly, Oxford University Press 2014). He was awarded with the ABG/VN Essay Prize 2009, the Prize for Young Art Critics 2010 and the NWO/Boekman Dissertation Prize 2015.

Introduction: Critique of Art 1. Autonomy and Critique 1.1 Introduction 1.2 The birth of autonomy 1.3 The artist in the marketplace 1.4 Art versus society 1.5 Conclusion 2. Ends of Art 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Annihilation of semblance: Baroque allegory 2.3 Allegory and commodity 2.4 Proliferation of the aesthetic: technological reproducibility 2.5 Adorno's dialectic of semblance 2.6 Culture industry: the social liquidation of art 2.7 Modernism: self-critique of semblance 2.8 Conclusion Excursus I - The (N)everending Story Hegel and the beginning of the end Danto's post-historical pluralism Vattimo's weak reality Conclusion 3. Experience, History, and Art 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Benjamin's concept of experience 3.3 Experience and history 3.4 Art history and monadology 3.5 Adorno: experience and mimesis 3.6 Natural history 3.7 The tendency of the material and the crystallization of the monad 3.8 Conclusion Excursus II - Base and Superstructure Reconsidered Struggling with a metaphor A farewell to Marx A parallax view on historical materialism Conclusion 4. The Art of Critique 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Benjamin's reading of the early German Romantics 4.3 Revolutionary criticism 4.4 An exemplary piece of criticism: Benjamin's Goethe essay 4.5 Adorno's immanent criticism 4.6 The necessity and impossibility of criticism 4.7 Adorno's Mahler 4.8 Conclusion Excursus III - Where is the Critic? Rise and fall of the critic Why criticism? The critic as intellectual Conclusion Conclusion A distance, however close The 'actuality' of Benjamin and Adorno Critical models Post-Fordism and the new spirit of capitalism Becoming life versus resistance Appendix - Notes on a Camp