Abstract art
Analysis

One socio-historical explanation that has been offered for the growing prevalence of the abstract in modern art—an explanation linked to the name of Theodor W. Adorno —is that such abstraction is a response to (and a reflection of) the growing abstraction of social relations in industrial society.

Frederic Jameson similarly sees modernist abstraction as a function of the abstract power of money, equating all things equally as exchange-values. The social content of abstract art is then precisely the abstract nature of social existence—legal formalities, bureaucratic impersonalization, information/power—in the world of late modernity.

By contrast, Post-Jungians would see the quantum theories with their disintegration of conventional ideas of form and matter as underlying the divorce of the concrete and the abstract in modern art.
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