Introduction

One of the central questions in aesthetics since Hegel has been: How does the work of art relate to history? What is its relation, if any, to the social, economic and political circumstances that surround it? This question becomes all the more pressing in modernity. As long as the work of art still has a clear institutional or ritual function, the relation between the work of art (if one can even speak of it that way) and history is clear. As soon as art becomes autonomous, however, this relation is no longer obvious. Is the work of art somehow ‘symptomatic’, is it a ‘reflection’ of its time, or an expression of it? Is it part of a dominant ideology, or, conversely, does it offer a critique of such an ideology, and if so, how should we understand this critique?

Some would argue that, in a postmodern society, these questions have become less urgent again, since art has ‘ended’ and has once again been thoroughly embedded in daily life. If art, indeed, has completely dissolved into society, the question of its relation to society becomes meaningless. But if one argues, as I have done in the preceding sections, that art has not ended yet, and that it still has social and historical significance, this raises the question of what this significance is. For both Benjamin and Adorno, the answer to this question is that the work of art has significance as a repository and medium of experience. By ‘experience’ however, they mean neither the life-experience of the individual artist, nor some religious or mystical experience. I will argue in this chapter that their concept of experience is supra-individual and socio-historical, and that it should be seen in relation to the history of production and reproduction of human life in society. The work of art, as a ‘seismograph’, registers structural shifts in the mode of experience.

Both Benjamin and Adorno argue that in modernity we witness a decline of experience.