The Politics of Autonomous Art

Given my recent posting on the nuclear situation in Japan, and Dali's response to nuclear testing in 1947, I thought it important to re-emphasize the importance of the independence of art. I am, threfore, going to revisit Adorno's essay "Commitment" published in 1965, though not published in English until 1974, in New Left Review.

In the last section of this essay, he observes how politics enter art. He does believe that art should address current events and concerns but neither should it be solely dedicated to issues, at the exclusion of itself as an artwork.

When a work is merely itself and no other thing, as in a pure pseudo-scientific construction, it becomes bad art–literally pre-artistic...the content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped into them: if anything is it the opposite.
Nevertheless, an emphasis on autonomous works is itself socio-political in nature.

The critical role of art is both critiquing society as it was and imagining something better. At the same time, he was outspokenly skeptical of political art, as such. In the words of Adorno scholar Simon Jarvis, "the danger for politically committed art is that it will end up as bad art without becoming good politics either."

There are plenty of issues in our modern world, and country: poverty of education, use of nuclear energy, disrespect of the humanities to the exclusive favor of the sciences, scare-mongering politicians, economic uncertainty perhaps depression, working with varying gender identities, just to name the first few that come to my mind. We may wish to address these but to do so as Dali or Socialist Realism did, would be a disservice to the actual complexities of each of these situations. That is where art has an advantage over regular, by which I mean verbal, discourse.

Art can commit to a discussion without losing its autonomy, by virtue of its artistic means. Art need not be reduced to a simple statement nor should it. That is the problem that I have mentioned before with much conceptual art. If you can explain to me the artwork than all you have produced is work, not art. A statement is so easy. I make them here all the time. Art, however, has the possibility of something else. A something else that I will attempt to exemplify by not defining it, but instead leave it to each artist to decipher alone.