“Art Has No Power over <i>Schein</i> through Its Abolition”

Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics takes up the German Idealist and Romantic idea of “Schein” – the “beautiful illusion” characteristic of authentic art – and reinterprets it through the lens of his own very particular kind of dialectical Marxism. Unlike his friend, Walter Benjamin, who welcomed the overcoming of so-called auratic art, Adorno believed that Schein can thus be vindicated. Whether this is so, the article argues, depends on how far one accepts Adorno’s adoption of a Marxist-Hegelian conception of social meaning.