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Adorno On Quantitative Aesthetics

If an empirically oriented aesthetics uses quantitative averages as norms, it unconsciously sides with social conformity. What such an aesthetics classifies as pleasing or painful is never a sensual given of nature but something preformed by society as a whole, by what it sanctions and censors, and this has always been challenged by artistic production.

Theodor Adorno, “Aesthetic Theory”, p.267 (Athlone), p.347 (Continuum).