Introduction

Many of the issues I have discussed in Chapter 1 concerning art in modernity – the relation between artists and the public, the new and the ever-thesame, beauty and truth – are present, explicitly or implicitly, in Benjamin's essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1936). This essay, as Howard Caygill remarks, is both the most influential and least understood text in Benjamin's oeuvre. But, as others have argued, it might be the case that the essay owes its popularity and influence precisely to its ambivalent position and to the vast range of potential (mis)interpretations resulting from that position.

Almost as famous as Benjamin's essay is Adorno's criticism of it, and just as often is it, too, misunderstood. The difference between Adorno's and Benjamin's positions is often presented in terms of a conflict between ‘high’ art versus mass culture, between thoroughly dialectical philosophy and Brechtian ‘blunt thinking’, or between autonomous art and politically committed art. And, while all these factors certainly play a role, what is really at stake in this debate, as will be argued in this chapter, is the end of art. Adorno, in his letter to Benjamin of 18 March 1936, noted the continuity of the work-of-art essay with Benjamin's project of the ‘dialectical selfdissolution of myth’, here presented as the ‘disenchantment of art’; and he continued by saying that ‘the question of the “liquidation” of art has been a motivating force behind my own aesthetic studies for many years’ (ABC, 127-128; ABB, 126).

What do Benjamin and Adorno mean when they speak about the ‘disenchantment’ or ‘liquidation’ of art. To find out what is at stake in the work-of-art essay, we need first to take a closer look at Benjamin's aesthetic project, by discussing his interpretation of the Baroque mourning play and Baudelaire's poetry. Next, we will see how Adorno takes up this notion of the liquidation of art in his analyses of the culture industry and modernist art.