In his essay, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”(1936), Walter Benjamin praised such reproductive art as films and photographs in that they opened a new way of common people’s reception of art by liquidating the ‘cult value’ or ‘aura’ of traditional artworks enjoyed by a limited number of high-class people. Theodor W. Adorno, however, put forward a counter-argument against him in an essay titled “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”(1938). To Adorno the advent of popular art meant neither artistic innovation nor political emancipation, quite the opposite to what Benjamin expected. What is interesting about Adorno’s argument is totally based on his analysis on musical phenomena while Benjamin developed his theory by focusing on films. Unlike Benjamin who defended popular arts such as films for their innovative character freed from traditional artistic convention, Adorno points out that the intimacy and accessibility of popular music cannot be maintained without the essential elements of Western traditional music such as functional harmonic system and tonality. Furthermore he argues that change of people’s perception on art cannot lead to emancipation but to restriction in that the musical taste and enjoyment of the masses are incessantly reduced to ‘habitual responses’ by the power of ‘exchange value’ in the capitalist market system where ‘familiar things’ are deceptively provided as ‘new things’. Paying attention to these discrepancies, I try to draw the entire picture of Benjamin-Adorno debate and take a close look at their different points of view on the task of progressive arts in the age of mass media, respectively suggested in “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” and “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”. Although this study aims at examining the oppositional moments of Benjamin-Adorno debate, it is also the critical attempt to shed light on the common ground of dialectical thinking shared by Benjamin and Adorno, both of whom were struggling to find the ways of artistic emancipation in the age of mechanical reproduction and mass media.
In his essay, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”(1936), Walter Benjamin praised such reproductive art as films and photographs in that they opened a new way of common people’s reception of art by liquidating the ‘cult value’ or ‘aura’ of traditional artworks enjoyed by a limited number of high-class people. Theodor W. Adorno, however, put forward a counter-argument against him in an essay titled “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”(1938). To Adorno the advent of popular art meant neither artistic innovation nor political emancipation, quite the opposite to what Benjamin expected. What is interesting about Adorno’s argument is totally based on his analysis on musical phenomena while Benjamin developed his theory by focusing on films. Unlike Benjamin who defended popular arts such as films for their innovative character freed from traditional artistic convention, Adorno points out that the intimacy and accessibility of popular music cannot be maintained without the essential elements of Western traditional music such as functional harmonic system and tonality. Furthermore he argues that change of people’s perception on art cannot lead to emancipation but to restriction in that the musical taste and enjoyment of the masses are incessantly reduced to ‘habitual responses’ by the power of ‘exchange value’ in the capitalist market system where ‘familiar things’ are deceptively provided as ‘new things’. Paying attention to these discrepancies, I try to draw the entire picture of Benjamin-Adorno debate and take a close look at their different points of view on the task of progressive arts in the age of mass media, respectively suggested in “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” and “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”. Although this study aims at examining the oppositional moments of Benjamin-Adorno debate, it is also the critical attempt to shed light on the common ground of dialectical thinking shared by Benjamin and Adorno, both of whom were struggling to find the ways of artistic emancipation in the age of mechanical reproduction and mass media.
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