Theodor W. Adorno (trans. Francis McDonagh), "Commitment" [based on a March 1962 radio broadcast under the title "Engagement oder künstlerische Autonomie"] in Andrew Arato, Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Continuum, 1978, pp. 300–318 (modernist art as an opposition to the conventional experience of the mass media).
"[Art's] paradoxical task is to attest to the lack of concord while at the same time working to abolish discordance" (Adorno quoted by James Martin Harding in Adorno and "a Writing of the Ruins", SUNY Press, 1997, p. 30); variant translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor in Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1997, University of Minnesota Press, p. 168: "Paradoxically, art must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time envision its reconciliation; this is a possibility only for its nondiscursive language." (Original German: "Paradox hat sie das Unversöhnte zu bezeugen und gleichwohl tendenziell zu versöhnen; möglich ist das nur ihrer nicht-diskursiven Sprache.").
