"Amusement, free of all restraint, would be not only the opposite of art but its complementary extreme...The more seriously art takes its opposition to existence, the more it resembles the seriousness of existence, its antithesis: the more it labors to develop strictly according to its own formal laws, the more labor it requires to be understood, whereas its goal had been precisely to negate the burden of labor." (63)
Though wordy and convoluted in many senses, this statement by Horkheimer and Adorno touches on a few concepts we have been talking about thus far in class. It is the dichotomy between amusement as art and labor as art. The authors seem to believe that art that is amusing or created for the purpose of amusement is, in fact, more morose that art becomes. The idea of art, in contrast, is to be free flowing and expressive, not bound by rules and restrictions.
A personal example of art such as this is the free form of painting that requires very little labor, but instead frees the mind for more thought and expressive forms of amusement. The lack of labor opens the door for more interpretations of the artists intentions. Whereas art that is labored intensely upon seems to be confined to only what the artist intended.
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