Adorno/Warhol

Andy Warhol, "Marilyn Diptych" (1962)



"The objective dissolution of society is subjectively manifested in the weakening of the erotic urge, unable to bind together self-preserving monads, as if mankind were imitating the physicists' theory of the exploding universe....When Casanova called a woman unprejudiced, he meant that no religious convention prevented her from giving herself; today the unprejudiced woman is the one who no longer believes in love, who will not be hoodwinked into investing more than she can expect in return. Sexuality, the supposed instigator of all the bustle, has become the delusion that self-denial comprised in the past. As the arrangements of life no longer allow time for pleasure conscious of itself [i.e., free and rational], replacing it by the performance of physiological functions, de-inhibited sex is itself de-sexualized."
-Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia #107 (1951)