When, soon after the financial crisis of 2008, several European governments announced plans to cut budgets for art and culture, a heated public debate erupted. The opinion pages in newspapers, and blogs, overflowed with comments from all kinds of people – everyone from representatives of the cultural sector (such as curators, actors, critics and so on) to philosophers, and from politicians to ‘the man in the street’ – arguing for, or against, the need for art in society. All sorts of demonstrations were organized against the budget cuts, for instance in Italy, Hungary, and the Netherlands. Opponents of the cuts had it that art promotes civilization and solidarity, or brings us into contact with something higher, or with ourselves; that it is a mirror of society, or simply part of our tradition, and for all these reasons deserves government support. Cutting subsidies was considered to be nothing other than a one-way ticket to barbarism. Meanwhile, supporters of the cuts asked why taxpayers should support the extravagance or ‘hobbies’ of others, or should promote works of art that the general public considered incomprehensible, obscure, or downright banal. Atonal music and avant-garde works such as Duchamp's urinal often functioned as whipping-boys for their arguments.

What was most striking in this public discussion was how difficult it seemed to be to come up with decisive arguments about why art mattered. The autonomy of art, which was dearly won in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, now presented itself as a problem: artists and art enthusiasts seemed unable to provide a raison d’être for what, to them, was evidently valuable. Thus, they unwillingly confirmed the opening lines of Theodor W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970): ‘It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist’ (AT, 1; 7, 9). Adorno was pointing up a crisis in art and aesthetics – a crisis one might describe, following art theorist Jean-Marie Schaeffer, as a legitimation crisis. In my view, this crisis has by no means ended since Adorno wrote Aesthetic Theory.