Artwork and the Empirical World: Art as a Social Critic in Adorno's Thought

Theodor Adorno is one of those philosophers who give a high position to art in their thought. That is, without having a true conception of his ideas on art, one cannot capture very much of his thoughts. The same is true for other philosophers like Kant and Hegel. I believe that Adorno's most important concern regarding art was its dialectical relation with the empirical or everyday-world and the status quo. The reason is that for Adorno art is the only sphere of life which has escaped the ossified relations of the capitalist world and has been a shelter for qualified freedom. It is only in artworks that one can hear of the real pain and suffering, the pain of living in a reified society where no room is left for true life. This paper is not a comprehensive discussion of Adorno's ideas. I have just tried to present the most important discussions in Adorno's writings on the relation between art and the empirical world. The leading thread of this paper is the ways through which art criticizes the status quo. In the first section, I will focus on the concept of Culture Industry in order to give a clear description of what Adorno contrasts with the autonomous art. In the second section, I will investigate the dialectical relation between artworks and the empirical world. And in the last section, I will put forward the discussions concerning the form and content of artworks and their relation to social criticism.