Between utopian critique and the politics of affirmation: Art and social change in the early twenty -first century.
Item
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Title
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Between utopian critique and the politics of affirmation: Art and social change in the early twenty -first century.
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Identifier
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AAI3205001
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identifier
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3205001
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Creator
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Rothenberg, Julia.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Stanley Aronowitz
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Date
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2006
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Theory and Methods | Art History
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Abstract
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This dissertation provides a critical reappraisal of central categories of Theodor Adorno's aesthetic and social theory by testing their ability to account for transformations in the aesthetic sphere from the middle of the twentieth, to the beginning of the twenty-first century. In chapter one, I contrast Adorno's work Pierre Bourdieu's; arguing that Adorno's dialectical approach better explains modern art's paradoxical position as both apologist and critic of the dominant social order. In chapter two, I examine the work of the Abstract Expressionists and the critic Clement Greenberg, employing Adorno's understanding of art's "dual-character" to explain this work's relationship to Cold War culture. Chapters three and four address the usefulness and limitations of Adorno's perspective for understanding work that falls outside of his high-modernist paradigm through two case studies: the Pop Art of Andy Warhol and feminist art including the body art of Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneemann and the "deconstructivist" art of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. In chapter three I analyze shifts in the art world that occurred during the nineteen-sixties including the unabashed embrace of economic success and art's transformed relationship to popular culture, status, labor and subjectivity. In chapter four, I point out that despite feminist art's disavowal of modernist practices, it shared Adorno's critique of the instrumental subject of post-industrial society and his faith in subjectivity and the aesthetic sphere as sites of utopian transformation. However, Adorno's and earlier feminist art's utopianism was countered by the influence of postmodernism on feminist aesthetic practices. I address such practices and the central theoretical tenets to which they point through an examination of the work of Judith Butler. This discussion demonstrates the implications of the disavowal of utopian thought for aesthetic and political practice. In the conclusion, I discuss the position of art and the art world of New York City within the contemporary social, political and urban context and assess the effectiveness of the analytical categories developed in the preceding chapters. Considered in light of the case studies, their limitations in terms of an analysis of contemporary art become apparent and these limitations in turn suggest further directions for a theoretical sociology of art.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
