This thesis critically analyses the implications of a now global capitalist modernity for Theodor W. Adorno's theory of art. The thesis takes as its starting point the sociological presuppositions at play in his social theory and problematises the spatial and historical dimensions in which they are embedded. The analysis of the process of homogenisation of social relations that Adorno presents as a constitutive feature of societies during monopoly capitalism brings to the fore the centrality of the state as administrator. This thesis claims that there is a spatial contradiction in Adorno's definition of society, given that the interconnectedness of capitalism as a system is negated by the restriction of that definition to industrialised societies. In other words, there is a universalisation of the particularity of industrialised societies underlying Adorno's social theory, that hides a functionalist understanding of the state and disavows its constitutive character for capitalist social relations. The introduction of an analysis of the particularity of the state in latin American societies serves as a counterpoint to the societies analysed by Adorno. latin American societies are analysed from the point of view of Dependency Theory, particularly in relation to Henrique Cardoso's and Enzo Faletto's concept of dependent development. This concept allows a further differentiation internal to latin American societies and problematises the common assumption that structural heterogeneity is a key concept for understanding these societies. Consequently, the thesis focuses its analysis on the socio-economic and political situation of the societies in the Southern Cone of South America, particularly Argentina, given their relative social homogenisation during the 1960s. The thesis claims that contrary to Adorno's assumption that capitalist social development destroys collective subjectivities while producing homogenisation, the Southern Cone societies show that development and relative social homogenisation in contexts of dependency do not necessarily produce political neutralisation but rather its opposite. The problematisation of Adorno's social theory is further complicated by the historical development of capitalism during neoliberalism. The decoupling of the spatial grounding of the relation between capital and labour constituted during monopoly capitalism is presented from the point of view of the radical transformation of Argentine society from the mid-1970s onwards. The thesis introduced the concept of the 'destruction of the social' in reference to the central role that the process of accumulation by dispossession, as theorised by David Harvey, has for the transformation of Argentina. Given this expanded global context, the thesis then discusses the effects that the transformation of the relation between capital and labour has for the conditions of production of artistic labour during neoliberalism. In particular, it claims that the 'developmentalist' dynamic that aligns technological development, industrialisation and artistic material in Adorno's concept of the new, has been problematised by the primacy of financial valorisation as a form of accumulation, and the dynamic role that accumulation by dispossession has in it. The emergence of a globally expanded labour theory of culture is analysed in relation to the contemporary art produced in Argentina between the late 1960s and the 2000s. The relation between the socially regressive tendencies developed during this period and artistic technique is analysed throguh the introduction of the notion of the 'return to craft.'

The main aim of theis thesis is to construct a critical concept of performance within a generic concept of art through a two-fold operation. Firstly, it reconstructs the development of a generic concept of performance - distinct from the performing arts - in the period of post-WWII art in North America by focusing on task-dance and the event-score as two emblematic artistic strategies of this period. Task-dance and event-score practices, it argues, had a central role in the practical transformation from a medium-specific to a generic concept of art. Secondly it examines the key philosophical concepts that are inseparable from a generic concept of art, and are necessary for the reconstruction of a generic concept of performance: 'practice', 'labour', 'autonomy', 'abstraction', 'medium', 'mediation', 'subject', 'object', 'structure' and 'abstraction'. The central argument of the thesis is that a critical reconstruction of the concept of performance within the context of post-WWII art must take into account a generic and a autonomous concept of art. The latter refers to a post-medium-specific concept of art, which is still autonomous in Theodor Adorno's understanding of the term: art as derived from, yet distinctively and formally separated from empirical reality. Embedded but formally abstracted from the social relations from which it comes, the category of 'performance', the thesis argues, is a practice of relations. It is a practice in the sensein which Karl Marx formulates practice in his early writings as social and sensuously empirical. It also refers to practice in the sense in which Marx articulates a radically new concept of the subject through this category. The thesis also aims to make a contribution to art theory through its critical methodology. It forces a reconsideration of performance within the framework of 'art in general', and more specifically, it emphasises dance's central role in this history. It employs a number of terms and categories central to task-dance and event-score practices that, it argues, are internal to the generic category performance as it operates within the context of a generic concept of art. The central problem from which this thesis sets out concerns the way in which the dominating concept of performance - derived from cultural theory - is used within art theory. Cutting across disciplines such as Cultural Studies, Performance Studies and Theatre Studies, this conception fails to distinguish between art and culture more generally, and between art and other modes of reality. In short, the thesis confronts a cultural concept of performance - and the related category of performativity - as well as its application to performance practices in art, with a critical one that is reconstructed through a different set of philosophical categories and methods. Chapter 1 argues that the development of a generic concept of art and performance is best described as a shift towards practice, primarily through Marx's account of this. Chapter 2 confronts art-theoretical conceptions of the event-score and task-dance, based in structuralism and pragmatism with Immanuel Kant, and demostrates how John Dewey;s notion of art relies on a conflated notion of Aristotle's practice/poiesis-distinction. Drawing on Husserl's 'phenomenological reduction' and Kant's 'acts of abstraction', Chapter 3 argues that they negation of a medium-specific conception of the object in event-score and task-dance practices constructed a new conception of the art object: the performative structure-object. Chapter 4 considers the role of negation in task-dance, in relation to Adorno's concept of autonomous art and Marx's notion of abstract labour. Chapter 5 demonstrates the way in which the performative-structure object is transcendental and performative, and argues that it must be understood as the practical condition for the generalisation of the category of performance within art.

Since the turn of the century art criticism in the West has repeatedly declare itself "in crisis". This crisis had several iterations: the loss of stable formal criteria by which to criticise artworks in the wake of conceptual art and a related abdication of aesthetic judgement; the increasing dominance of the art market as the arbiter of artistic value; the functional replacement of art critics by curators, and the inadequacy of extant models of criticism in the face of contemporary practices that challenge traditional critical categories, practices that despite operating in the institutional field of art seem to dissolve into non-artistic activities. This work reads most of these positions as remaining too attached to a model of criticism grounded on aesthetic judgement, even when this is described as "aesthetic experience", "aesthetic framing", "affective intensity" or others. Against such an attachment, this work argues that it is artistic autonomy as the self-reflexion and autopoiesis of the artwork - as already advanced by the early German Romantics and developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno - that remains crucial: art as critique rather than a critique of art. With this in mind, rather than understanding the rise of curating as a threat to criticism, this work proposed that in the aftermath of what Thierry de Duve has called "art in general", it is within the institutional forms that have started to emerge in the wake of this new understanding of curating, that artistic autonomy can continue to be developed in the context of a globalised artworld.