Preface

The initial impetus for this book came from my study of Theodor W. Adorno’s socially critical and modernist aesthetics. I argued in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory that his conception of artistic truth has much to offer aesthetics today, but it employs an autonomist theory of art that is both flawed and outdated. In making this argument I drew on Jürgen Habermas’s insights into the paradoxes of modernization. Yet I found Habermas’s social philosophy insufficiently attuned to the concerns of contemporary artists.

Having learned from both Adorno and Habermas, I set out to develop a social philosophy of the arts that addresses cultural controversies. This has required two volumes. The first, titled Artistic Truth, examines the aesthetic, linguistic, and epistemological frameworks of contemporary art. Discussing both analytic and continental philosophies, it weds Adorno’s idea of artistic truth with Habermas’s emphasis on communicative rationality, while modifying both. The second volume is the book you are now reading. Art in Public provides a social philosophical context for the first volume’s claims about artistic truth, and it employs those claims to develop a new understanding of art’s role in civil society. Together the two volumes aim to provide a comprehensive critical theory that breaks the grip of modernist aesthetics without discounting the importance of modernist ideas.