Pandora's Box Is Open

It’s very challenging to write about the arts in the 21 st century, particularly about music and dance as creative disciplines, as praxis. I must admit, however, that Adorno’s dissection of the social dimension of art through aesthetics as a discipline (1) continues to inform and contextualize my notion of art and culture, especially music, in ways that no other critical theoretician could ever do. After all, he was not only the luminary who conceived critical theory but also the greatest philosopher of music who ever lived. As a multidisciplinary artist myself, I’m grateful for the opportunities I had to showcase my work in the performing arts during the last two decades of the 20 th century when cultural and philosophical ideas framed by the avant-garde were resurrected and regarded if not as an aesthetics of permanence (2) at least as a referential vocabulary resisting the annihilation of all isms by postmodernists (3). After the year 2000, however, the skepticism, agnostici