No moral terror can prevent the side the work of art shows its beholder from giving him pleasure, even if only in the formal fact of temporary freedom from the compulsion of practical goals. Thomas Mann called this quality of art ‘high spirits’, a notion intolerable to people with morals. Brecht himself, who was not without ascetic traits—which reappear transmuted in the resistance of any great autonomous art to consumption—rightly ridiculed culinary art; but he was much too intelligent not to know that pleasure can never be completely ignored in the total aesthetic effect, no matter how relentless the work.

Theodor Adorno, “Commitment”, in Aesthetics and Politics, translated by Francis McDonagh