“According to current standards, good artists do not serve truth better than good prison wardens or bankers or housemaids. If we tried to argue that the calling of an artist is nobler, we would be told that the contention is meaningless- that while the efficiency of two housemaids can be compared on the basis of their relative cleanliness, honest, skills, etcetera, there is no way of comparing a housemaid and an artist. However, thorough analysis would show that in modern society, there is one implicit yardstick for art as well as for unskilled labour, namely time, for goodness in the sense of a specific efficiency is a function of time.”
—
Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason: Means and Ends
“Goodness in sense of a specific efficiency” still reduces art to a cultural commodity rather than an individual experience. It is no longer conducive to a healthy rigour of rational, intellectual integrity; instead, what the individual experiences is not any kind of revelation, but really mere illusion which has subsumed any substance or objective truth from a piece of art. Its truth, therefore, is only functional. That’s what I think anyway.
