Adorno Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts

Theodor Adorno is one of the most provocative and important, but least understood of contemporary thinkers. Yet despite the fact that Adorno is one of the only important contemporary philosophers to have published a theory of aesthetics, his influence in the arts has been severely limited by the perception, shared unfortunately by some commentators, that his is a merely negative position. Adorno Reframed not only frames Adorno for an audience coming to his aesthetic theory for the first time, through the medium of detailed discussion of particular artworks and pieces of music, but also reframes Adorno as a utopian thinker rather than a bleak pessimist. Drawing on new scholarship, Adorno Reframed challenges the popular image of the miserable elitist without in any way domesticating Adorno for the world of the multinational entertainment corporations. This Adorno is a supporter of late modernism, and a defender of the idea that aesthetic experience offers a real alternative to corporatised forms of human existence.