Abstract

In the 20th century Adorno and Heidegger put forth two different sets of arguments for the paramount importance of art. While the former offered a philosophy of modernist art and interpreted it as a negativity within the means-end rationality of everyday bourgeois existence, the latter praised poetry and art for being a rare modern instance of the disclosure of truth. Within a century exemplified by master narratives promoting collective agendas, they both denigrated the social function of art, thereby promoting the ideals of modernism (the urban, new and transient) and its unreconciliated "other" (the rural, traditional and "eternal"). Are the early 21st century art and its appreciation different and in which ways? In brief, is Adorno's and Heidegger's "overvaluation" of art but a footnote to their philosophy or is it relevant for today's philosophy of art? The paper offers some possible answers to these questions. (edited)