The preliminary sketch of this book arose from two studies that had recently come to completion. The first, published as Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, raised questions about Theodor W. Adorno's conception of artistic truth. But it also defended Adorno from criticisms on precisely the same topic. As the Adorno study drew to a close, I participated in a second study, an interdisciplinary research project on mass-mediated culture. Published as the collaboratively written book Dancing in the Dark, edited by Roy Anker, that project convinced me of something I already knew from my work on Adorno: philosophical aesthetics, as traditionally understood and practiced, is outdated with respect to hotly contested cultural issues. To address such issues, it needs to be reconceived, in conversation with social theory, with newer fields of inquiry such as communications and cultural studies, and with emerging discourses on public art and cultural policy. So I set myself the ambitious challenge of reconceptualizing philosophical aesthetics in a single volume to be titled “Cultural Politics and Artistic Truth.”

While working my way into relevant literature in several different areas, I discovered that two volumes would be required. The first, which you are reading, examines the aesthetic, linguistic, and epistemological underpinnings of contemporary art. It does so in conversation with several twentieth-century philosophers on the topic of truth in art. Although nonphilosophers might find these conversations abstruse, their intent in this book is to help illuminate the current cultural scene.