He shows how art has a semi-autonomous 'truth-content' (a la Kant), but one that is always the product and embodiment of unresolved contradictions within the larger social fabric. (a la Hegel, and more so Marx).
Returning to the NVidia article at the root of this thread, this passage pops out as problematic (certainly for Adorno, but also in general): "In our case, we use supervised machine learning, with a dataset of photographs pre-categorized as aesthetically pleasing or not." There is a real sense of question-begging going on here. And Adorno would say that this approach forecloses the very fact that the definitional boundaries of these categories are constantly shifting and lack any real social stability.
edit: links.... http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/aesthetic-theo... http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/
The work is not at all contradictory to Adorno, especially in the sense that it is explicitly trying to as non-reductionist as possible, and assuming notion of aesthetics is a dynamic entity .
There is a finite pattern in the dataset; more interesting, it has its interesting share of subtleties ( for example, as opposed to a image classification problems), and the technological question is whether we can capture these.
But there is another interesting data question. For our work, we curated our training set with the help of expert curators. But the dataset itself is a metamorphising entity; i.e. it is subject to revision ( it is a continuous process for us at the moment), but more interestingly it is a chance for open debate between our curators. In some sense, technology allow to codify and challenge our notion of aesthetics ( especially with the evolution in our training sets) at a given point of time.
