A metaphor like “the above-and-beyond” draws the gaze of an art appreciation upward. For all of that putatively Romantic inclination, some music criticism following Adorno peers downward, toward art as object. This cosmology grants art no relation to Being, not even as deformation. No animating spirit besouls art's mechanisms, to mime a vocabulary that appears antiquated and inefficient today. But the idea borne by so archaic a language still retains enough presence to attract refutations. An older poetics’ deference to the mind's generative powers makes one of its most conspicuous imprints on contemporary thought in the idea of art as an intentional act.

In literary-critical circles, the conception of art as an object that, if competently executed, should be impenetrable to intention is best known as an inheritance of New Criticism. That position is most famously spelled out in William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's “The Intentional Fallacy,” from 1946. It is an axiom of art criticism, they say, that an author's intention is usually unavailable and always unnecessary. Their reasoning is that “if the poem succeeded” in realizing the poet's intention, “then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do,” in which case there is no need to go outside of the work in search of an intention. In music-critical circles, a campaign against intention has been going on for quite a while longer. Starting in 1854, Eduard Hanslick handed down an opinion that could have been cited by Wimsatt and Beardsley as legal precedent: “In music there is no ‘intention’ that can compensate for a lack of ‘invention.’ Whatever does not appear is simply not there in the music, and what does appear there has ceased to be mere intention.”

The long-standing effort at suppression has had uneven results. Its triumph seems complete in some academic circles, yet pockets of resistance continue to appear, especially, but not only, among the public. For that reason, more recent critics like Abbate and Parker have continued the argument that responsible criticism cannot move forward until the last strongholds of art as something meant have been cleared away. They do not look, however, to Hanslick or the New Critics for an anti-intentionalist aesthetic.