Adorno argued in History and Freedom that the idea of history as progress in the realisation of freedom was shaken to its very core by the Auschwitz. This catastrophe had its impact on aesthetics in that the progressive quality of art could now refer to only such works that undermined the false optimism of the linear model of historical progress.
One way this undermining took place was the artistic critique of the conventions of the beautiful, glorified by traditional aesthetics as an expression of freedoms, exemplified by modernist aesthetic theory of Greenberg. In this theory abstraction has often been understood precisely in terms of an aesthetic of the beautiful based on the judgment of taste and there is an aesthetic distance from both popular cultural forms and the logic of the market. Art's logic is an interruption of tradition through formal innovation or revolutions to prevent its becoming an object of consumption and ultimately losing its emancipative functions.
he critique and undermining of modernist aesthetic theory was a negating of the beautiful form with its proportion, its balance, its unbroken unity, its harmony and its replacement by the rough, shapeless and resistant. Adorno argued in Aesthetic Theory that the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism (Lenhardt translation, p. 282).
The roots of the sublime are in Kant, who considered it to be an aspect of nature alone, and he conceptualised it in terms of elemental forces and limited it to a feeling for nature: a feeling we often get from being threatened by something beyond our control or understanding (Edmund Burke). Both Burke and Kant counterposed the sublime to beauty with Kant defining the experience of the sublime in terms of a certain apprehension of the "formless," "limitless," or "infinite."
The sublime was then transplanted from nature into art and expands its original confines through unfolding its latent work as the principle of formlessness at the core of form. Sublime then became connected to the unpresentable in art (Jean-Francois Lyotard) to terror, the monstrous and the uncanny that emerges when we step beyond the limitations of our knowledge, the ordered structures and codes, or the generally agreed upon. This points towards a sense of a void or nothingness - of being on a borderline or edge where we can no longer codify experience. We have stepped outside the Kantian formulation of the sublime.
In the contemporary world it is technology rather than nature (classically a stormy sea or a mountain range) that provides us with our strongest sense of the sublime. The sublime is now in fashion.