It's been a good while since I read "Reality and its Shadow", but it's an intriguing gem. It was originally solicited for "Les Temps Moderne", and so upset Sartre and Merleau-Ponty that they only published it with an editorial apparatus, including essays "refuting" it. It was taken as a critique of la litterature engage'. The basic argument is that art is made out of the "shells" shed by the appearances of phenomena on their way to integrating with each other into a coherent reality in experience. In other word, art is made out of garbage, the detritus of experience. Which seems to me about right. There may be a bit of a Judaic reproval of art there as "idolatry", emphasizing its unreality, unseriousness and ethical irresponsibility. But there is also a criticism of intentionalist notions of art and its reception/interpretation, as well as, confusions between engagement with artificial creations and real commitments. Art is a set of confused and artificial relations, akin to myth, but perhaps refusing its "participation", which mocks the imperative "order" of the world.

John,
I looked for 'Reality and Shadow' on the net but I couldn't find anything. A Pity. I've glanced through Totality and Infinity but I could find little. directly relevant. I presume that art is somehow connected to enjoyment and sensaton as distinct from utility.

There seems to be a different interpretations about 'Reality and Shadow' . Nick Smith, for instance, in Adorno vs. Levinas: Evaluating points of contention says:

The vituperative tone of Levinas’ early writings on aesthetics can seem quite jarring, particularly his 1948 essay 'Reality and its Shadow.' Here
Levinas describes art as a kind of false idol, disguised as an Other to divert our glance from the face. Art, he writes, "is the very event of obscuring, a descent into the night, an invasion of the shadow." Such a "magic" conversion of the human into the inhuman performs a "doping of the senses," and under this spell we mistakenly genuflect before the "bewitched," "bloodless," and "awkward" imitation of life. Art's "caricature" of life "turns into something tragic" as it "manifests itself in its stupidness as an idol." Thus, Levinas claims, "[a]rt then lets go of the prey for the shadow." Likewise, the chicanery of art distorts the temporality of suffering. "To say that an image is an idol" Levinas claims, "is to affirm that every image is in the last analysis plastic, and that every artwork is in the end a statue – a stoppage of time." Art renews Lot's curse, freezing beings into "pillars of salt." "The petrification of the instant in the heart of duration," Levinas argues, "is the greatest obsession of the artist." The work does not exist in time, but rather as paralyzed and trapped in a netherworld of silence. Eternally damned to an "empty interval grasps."

That's pretty strong stuff --it reads like it's come out of the Platonic tradition's severe devaluation of art.

Gary:

Levinas was a friend of Blanchot since school days and the essay shows his influence. So, yeah, it's strong stuff. Art is a dark medium. And I did mention the Judiac element. But that's not a denunciation of art in the name of the fullness or health of reality. It's a criticism of the cultic nature of art, of the cult of Art in modernity. Art is simply not reality. It bears something of the ambiguity of his early conception of evasion or escape, as something at once impelling and impossible or forbidden. But there's no question of banning art from the city. If art is the waste of experience, that's the counterpart of the weight of the world. (His wife was a musician and his son a concert pianist).

John,
Art offers us images for sure, but does that make it idolatous?

By the Judaic element do you mean something like One God Who brooks no graven images? Or forms of experience ---the raw immediacy of the
face---beyond language? This is to step into darkness where all cows are black.

Okay, art is not banned from the city as it is with Plato, but there sure is a disavowal of art in this early text; odd from someone close to Blanchot and close to musicans.

Is there a contradiction running through the texts? Does Levinas revise the early disavowal of art in his latter texts?

Gary:

Consider the context in 1948. It's not unreasonable to construe fascism, especially its German manifestation, as "political aestheticism". And it's also not unreasonable to question the confusion involved in the notion of art as political engagement. And that God who refused graven images, i.e. forbade the worship of the mythified forces of nature, is the same one who commanded an ethical compact that welcomed the stranger. Which has nothing to do with the criticism of Schelling's aesthetist "mysticism". (Nor is the "face" " beyond language" rather than the invocative source of language). There's not too much here different from the "positions" that Adorno would develop, though perhaps in a darker, starker hue. (Though are you underestimating the darkness and starkness of Adorno, because of the enchanting "warmth" of his style?) The barrier between art and life both can not and must be broken down, for the sake of both. Art must be accepted as unacceptable, rather than accepting the unacceptable. That photo of graffitti that you linked to had it about right.