ADORNO: ART HAS NO MISSION

This is my comment in Girish Shambu’s blog:
http://www.girishshambu.com/blog/2008/03/nicole-brenez-on-experimental-cinema.html

I really like this sentence by Brenez: “I prefer Adorno’s totally despairing belief [laughs] that art has no mission.”

I have no knowledge about Adorno, but I found some information about him in Wikipedia, which I think is interesting:

“Adorno perceived kitsch in terms of what he called the “culture industry,” where the art is controlled and formulated by the needs of the market and given to a passive population which accepts it—what is marketed is art that is non-challenging and formally incoherent, but which serves its purpose of giving the audience leisure and something to watch. It helps serve the oppression of the population by capitalism by distracting them from their alienation. Contrarily, art for Adorno is supposed to be subjective, challenging, and oriented against the oppressiveness of the power structure. He claimed that kitsch is parody of catharsis, and a parody of aesthetic experience.”