"Revoking the Experience of Modernity That Has Descended Upon These Paintings"

"When a painting was taken off the wall of the church and brought into the gallery of the museum, we were asked to look at it differently than the artist intended. Broken out of its original lifeworld and turned into a fragment (this is the original crime Adorno speaks of), the artwork became secular, a relic of another time and place, patched together with relics from other times and places. ('It would be an act of madness to enter a museum, kneel down before a painting of the virgin to pray for a soldier missing in battle, lighting a candle and leaving an offering on the floor near the picture before leaving,' Philip Fisher noted in 1975.) It is lost and adrift, yes, but it is also transformed, and here we find the other edge of the sword: One begins to draw connections the artist never imagined. That is the quixotic, heady power of the museum, the birth of which, one might go so far as to say, demands the death of the author. No works made before 1860 were meant to be contemplated in quite the same way—as Foucault reminds us, Manet was the first painter to imagine his paintings in the museum—but nothing that goes into it can resist its power. In this sense the museum is akin to the commodity system, another modern invention: Artworks confront all other artworks within its space. Inside, they change orientation, speak differently, take on new lives, assume new values. The viewer is charged with wondering about their potential, purchase, and power."

Alex Kitnick at Artforum discusses "the discontent with museums."

"The Necessary Resource if History Was to Be Understood as a Theatre of Revolutionary Possibility"

"It was Walter Benjamin, the Berlin-born literary and cultural critic who sustained an important affiliation with the Institute, who tried to explain the relationship between Marxism and religion with a memorable image: Marxist theory, he wrote, is like the chess-playing automatism first presented at the imperial court in 18th-century Vienna, whose movements seemed to be governed by nothing but the mechanical operation of levers and wheels. But the true animus of Marxist theory is theology, which in the modern era must hide itself from public view but still lends Marxism its apparently autonomous power, much like the individual who was cleverly concealed within the chess-player's cabinet and assured its victory." 

Peter E. Gordon at New Statesmen explores the relationship the Frankfurt School had with religion.

"You Won't Win the Day by Treating People Who Merely Disagree With You as Stalking Horses for Socialist Tyranny"

"American right-wingers hate multiculturalism and gay rights and radical feminism for their own sake, not because they were designed to pave the path for communism. But the story has the emotional advantage of allowing them to imagine that the trends they despise didn't arise from a long history of the social abuse of blacks, gays, women, and immigrants, but from sinister machinations of commies striving to enslave us. Never mind that the unstoppable traditionalist 'cultural decline' of the last several decades has not gotten the United States any closer to public ownership of the means of production.

Brian Doherty at Reason criticizes proponents of a "cultural Marxism" conspiracy.

"An Old Trope on the Conspiratorial Far Right"

"The Frankfurt School emerged during the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, both movements they opposed. What defined the Frankfurt School was their argument that a purely economic account of history was inadequate for accounting for the new dictatorships. Instead, there was a need for cultural analysis of authoritarianism, racism, and patriarchy.
"During the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse, then teaching in San Diego, rose to prominence as a mentor to the New Left. Angela Davis, who also studied with Adorno, was Marcuse's protege, and some New Left activists cited Marcuse’s abstruse works. Right-wing groups, notably the John Birch Society, made Marcuse a scapegoat for the upheavals of the 1960s. Marcuse himself received death threats from a right-wing militia. In a 1971 interview with Playboy, actor John Wayne blamed Marcuse for student protests, saying, 'Marcuse has become a hero only for an articulate clique. The men that give me faith in my country are fellas like Spiro Agnew, not the Marcuses.'
"The conspiracy theory was later revived in the 1980s by the paleo-conservative thinker William S. Lind, who claimed that the Frankfurt School was the foundation for political correctness. Via Lind, it has become a popular argument on the far right, often cited by figures like columnist Pat Buchanan and the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik."

Jeet Heer at the New Republic discusses the influence of "cultural Marxism" on Donald Trump.

"American Life as a Kind of Reality Show"

"As Stuart Jeffries points out in his recent book, 'Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School,' the ongoing international crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy has prompted a resurgence of interest in the body of work known as critical theory. The combination of economic inequality and pop-cultural frivolity is precisely the scenario Adorno and others had in mind: mass distraction masking élite domination. Two years ago, in an essay on the persistence of the Frankfurt School, I wrote, 'If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realized.'

"I spoke too soon."

 

Alex Ross at The New Yorker writes that, following the election of Donald Trump, Theodor Adorno's "moment of vindication is arriving now." 

"The Hunger for Books Providing a Critique of Capitalism Continues"

"I now realise that customised culture, which is very nearly ubiquitous today, is a mutation of what Adorno and Horkheimer wrote about in their classic Frankfurt School text Dialectic of Enlightenment seven decades ago. Their contention was that the freedom to choose, which was the great boast of the advanced capitalist societies in the west, was chimerical. Not only do we have the freedom to choose what was always the same, but, arguably, human personality had been so corrupted by false consciousness that there is hardly anything worth the name any more. 'Personality,' they wrote, 'scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions.' Humans had been transformed into desirable, readily exchangeable commodities, and all that was left to choose was the option of knowing that one was being manipulated. 'The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.' The Frankfurt School is relevant to us now because such critiques of society are even more true now today than when those words were written."

Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian wishes to revive the Frankfurt School philosophers.

"A Mutual Admonition Society"

"In the 1936 letter to Benjamin, Adorno offers a subtler argument—more of a plea for parity. Commercial logic is triumphant, he says, ensnaring culture high and low: 'Both 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 romantic to sacrifice one for the other.' In particular, it would be a mistake to romanticize the new mass forms, as Benjamin seems to do in his mesmerizing essay. Adorno makes the opposite mistake of romanticizing bourgeois tradition by denying humanity to the alternative. The two thinkers are themselves torn halves of a missing picture. One collateral misfortune of Benjamin’s early death is that it ended one of the richest intellectual conversations of the twentieth century."


Alex Ross in The New Yorker revisits Walter Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's ideas about pop culture.

Never Again?

"When the spirit of rebellion seized Germany’s youth in the late 1960s, it therefore took an extreme form. Many young people discerned a strong continuity—material, ideological, even spiritual— between the apparatus of the Third Reich and the present-day Federal Republic. Nourishing this perception were the theories promoted by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the aging representatives of the Institute for Social Research who had returned to Frankfurt from their American exile. For the Frankfurt School theorists, fascism was not merely a socio-political affliction particular to a certain time and place; it was a general pathology of modernity and Western industrial capitalism. Student radicals took this analysis to heart and were primed to see Nazism everywhere. 'Anti-fascism' seemed to demand a wholesale rejection of contemporary society."

Peter E. Gordon in The New Republic reviews Hans Kundnani's Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust.

I'm Living for Giving the Devil His Due

"Not everyone was as stiff as Adorno. In the U.S. during the '50s, intellectuals were often fascinated by mass culture, and some made an honest effort to assess it. One of the best and in some ways the most awkward was the Partisan Review critic Robert Warshow. His best-known essays--collected in 'The Immediate Experience'--concern the gangster, the western movie and the comic 'Krazy Kat.' You feel his valiant effort to come to terms with these important phenomena, but the closest he gets to admitting the pleasures of pop is describing his son's excitement over a comics club. Though born in 1917, the same year as Fiedler, Warshow projects both analytic rigor and the strain of earnestness.
"Fiedler, on the other hand, was intoxicated by pop even as he approached it as an old-school scholar. 'Though he was a champion of pop culture, he was kind of caught between two worlds,' said Ritz. 'He describes himself as a voyeur, not a participant. He was all about equivocation, being in two places and never being in one.'"

Upon the publication of a new book of essays, Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times remembers critic Leslie Fiedler.