It is the insistence that works of art blend completely into the closed surface of immediate experience, consonant with meagre perceptions of an easily recognisable reality and preformation mechanisms of subjective reaction, allowing people to ’cheaply unburden themselves’ through identification. Throughout his writings, one finds recurrent concern with the problem of aesthetic relativism: that the criterion of evaluating works of art ought to defer to judgments of taste, and therewith to an insatiable subjectivity that demands art ‘give’ them something.
With this seemingly off-the-cuff anecdote, Adorno, lecturing on the topic of aesthetics in 1958, gave illustration to a critique of a certain kind of aesthetic reception, or against the idea that art must be commensurate or conform to the experiential familiarity of the viewing subject.
I once knew a monster who said she could not read Proust because there were no figures in Proust with whom she could identify.
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