Abstracts:
This article presents a comparison of Gotthold E. Lessing’s theory of signs, as found in his Laocoön: an essay on the limits of painting and poetry (1766), and Theodore W. Adorno’s two essays on the relationship between music and painting. Our aim is to point out the decisive influence of German classical aesthetics on Adorno’s post-war aesthetics. Specifically, we discuss how Lessing’s theory functions as a framework for Adorno’s dialectical assessment of the formal specificity of artistic media and their possibilities of convergence in the context of the 1960’s avant-garde. In this context, we discuss the main implications of Adorno’s famous lecture of 1966, Art and the arts, which concerned the process of media convergence (Konvergenz) that intensified during the 1960’s, as well as the concepts of “overlapping” (Verfransung) between artistic media and of “pseudomorphosis”.
Keywords:
Lessing; Adorno; Music; Painting; Pseudomorphosis