261 Quotes by Theodor W. Adorno

Important artworks constantly divulge new layers, they age, grow cold and die.

In truth, the best works of art are by no means the most perfect ones, but rather those whose imperfection bears the most profound witness to their fundamental contradictions. That is why those works, whose success takes its measure from the failure of the world, assume something helpless, frail and disorganized under the gaze of contemporary cultural administration.

The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.

[Both high art and industrially produced consumer art] bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

Если индивидуальность критически относится к произведению, то и произведение критически относится к индивидуальности

The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society.

But the castration of perception by a court of control that denies it any anticipatory desire, forces it thereby into a pattern of helplessly reiterating what is already known.