“A work of art once aspired to tell the world what it is, to formulate a verdict. Take for example Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. The average concertgoer today is unable to experience its objective meaning. He listens to it as though it had been written to illustrate the program annotator’s comments. It is all set down in black and white- the tension between the moral postulate and social reality, the fact that, in contrast to the situation in France, spiritual life in Germany could not express itself politically but had to seek an outlet in art and music. The composition has been reified, made a museum piece, and its performance a leisure-time occupation, an event, an opportunity for star performances, or a social gathering that must be attended if one belongs to a certain group. But no living relation to the work in question, no direct, spontaneous understanding of its function as an expression, no experience of its totality as an image of what once was called the truth, is left. This reification is typical of the subjectivisation and formalisation of reason. It transforms works of art into cultural commodities, and their consumption into a series of haphazard emotions divorced from our real intentions and aspirations. Art has been severed from truth as well as politics and religion.”
— Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason
