In the light of this earlier post on Adorno, Art and Mimesis I've started re-reading the sections on art and mimesis in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. The opening paragraph in a section entitled 'Mimesis and Rationality' is an interesting one. Adorno writes:

Art is a refugee for mimetic behaviour. In art the subject, depending on how much autonomy it has, takes up various positions vis-a-vis its objective other from which it is always different but never entirely separate. Art's disavowal of magical practices---art's own antecendents---signifes that art shares in rationality. Its ability to hold its own in the midst of rationality, even while using the meqans of that rationality, is a response to the evils and irrationality of the rational bureaucratic world.

Adorno continues:

The end of all rationality viewed as the sum total of all pactical means would have to be something other than a means, hence a non-rationality quality. Capitalist society hides and disavows precisely this irrationality, whereas art does not. It represents truth in the two fold sense of preserving the image of an end smothered completely by irrationality and of exposing the irrationality and absurdity of the status quo.