Lecture on Adorno’s “Draft Introduction” to Aesthetic Theory

On Sunday, October 20th, Caesura editor Patrick Zapien presented a lecture on Theodor Adorno’s “Draft Introduction” to Aesthetic Theory. The lecture focused on the dialectic of freedom in art, its historical crisis, and how that crisis appears as the enigmatic essence of art in modernity. The task of the critic would then be to account for the concrete appearance of artworks as both subjective and objective phenomena and for art to be seen as a category of thought, a mode of consciousness congealed into an object, not belonging to any one individual but social in nature.