The content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped in to them

Even in the most sublimated work of art there is a hidden 'it should be otherwise'. When a work of art is merely itself and no other thing, as in a pure pseudo-scientific construction, it becomes bad art – literally pre-artistic. The form of true volition, however, is mediated through nothing other than the form of the work itself, whose crystallization becomes an analogy of that other condition which should be. As eminently constructed and produced objects, works of art, including literary ones, point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation of a just life. This mediation is not a compromise between commitment and autonomy, nor a sort of mixture of advanced formal elements with an intellectual content inspired by genuinely or supposedly progressive politics. The content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped in to them; if anything, it is the opposite.

Theodor Adorno, 'Commitment' in Utopias (ed. by Richard Noble) (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2009) p. 48