Aesthetic Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Paperback – 25 April 2013

a posthumous unfinished tour de force

Referenced this in thesis

White aesthetics are an unresolvable phenomenon in human life there are infinite varieties exemplified by the term. Adorno's is just one who put the term to question and enlightenment. It's one of those books, however, that perhaps should be read by students of the humanities and aparticularly philosophers and artists and art historians. It's a supportive guide that nevertheless needs to be argued against.

Adorno's magnum opus. Frustrating, eclectic, incisive, like a flame to the synapse. Undoubtedly the greatest work on Aesthetics in the 20th Century. Spars with the Aesthetics of Kant, Hegel, Valery, Benjamin as Adorno traverses a manifold of artistic mediums and numerous specific artist. What is form and content, what is meaning, what is truth-content, what is technique, what is arts relation to society, to it's creator, how should it be understood? Just some of the many questions this book stages. His chapter on the notion of Modernism alone is enough reason to grab this.Another admirable translation from the Anglophone scholar of Adorno Robert Hullot-Kentor. Well bound, nice typeface..great, because this is a book for life. Highly recommended.

Does art help you to transcend suffering or does it transmute suffering or both? Well, firstly, art need not have anything to do with suffering at all but can, as Kant thinks, be an experience of pure pleasure.If art helps you to transcend suffering then this a good thing. Escapism can be excellent. The question is what is good escapism? Good escapism takes you to a better, more lovely reality.If it transmutes suffering then suffering has no victory at all.But, please, let us not get too bogged down with art. Too much attention is given to art in aesthetics to the detriment of the beauty of everyday life.The artist gets her main inspiration from daily life where she lives. To beautify the simple world that inspires even the greatest art must be the priority.

This is Adorno's posthumous opus, unrevised before his sudden death, and so any view of the work must inevitably be tentative - we can never know what would have been added, cut or revised.The book itself rather reminds me of what happens when on entering an art gallery one espies a picture. One moves close to get a better view, however in doing so one begins to lose sight of the picture itself. Should one proceed further and closer, this effect is amplified, and if, to understand better one views a part of the picture through a magnifying glass, in the process of understanding more one only seems to get further away from the meaning of the picture. Has anyone ever penetrated further into the nature of Art than Adorno? I doubt it and yet, nothwithstanding some perecptive observations on Art, (and not a few stupidities) much remains I have to say impenetrable to me. Tolstoy, ended up largely writing nonsense when he attempted to do the same, so it is perhaps a subject where the only success one may have would be pyrrhic.Art remains enigmatic: Pointless but essential.

Highly irritating; a repetitive buzzword bingo fugue that needs editing with a machete.

This is a landmark and commanding work on aesthetics. You should read it, if you haven't yet. But this Bloomsbury edition - for reasons only known to the publisher - is printed throughout its 483 pages in a sans serif font of such violent and shocking ugliness, on such bright white paper, with such unyielding binding, that the process of reading it is made an impossible and thankless and intensely depressing effort. Don't buy this edition; go elsewhere.