In Politics and the Enigma of Art: The Meaning of Modernism for Adorno in Modernist Cultures (vol.1 No 2) David S. Ferris says that Adorno claims that with the advent of Modernism art enters into a relation with itself that threatens its future.

Adorno clarifies this effect of Modernist art when he describes how the revolutionary art movements of this period are forced to contradict the freedom their revolutionary intentions seemed to bestow so easily. For Adorno, a contradiction arises within these movements because what is at stake in them is not just freedom but absolute freedom. By pursuing such a freedom these movements went against a condition to which art must submit if it is to remain art. This condition, Adorno states, requires that art is “always limited to a particular.” As a result, the freedom sought by Modernism “falls into contradiction with the perennial foothold (Stand) unfreedom retains in the whole” (AT, 9/1). The one thing that the absolute freedom sought by these movements cannot overcome is this unfreedom retained in the whole – whole in the sense of everything that is not art, the world, the social, etc. For Adorno, every work of art must submit to this foothold, to the particular. Consequently, it is to this foothold that the adventure of Modernism will always be forced to return and as it does so, it comes into contradiction with the freedom it sought to affirm: it meets the unfreedom of its own existence, it meets the particular that scarcely supports the freedom of the unforeseen sought by Modernism’s revolutionary art movements.