New Concepts, New Realities: a review on the role of beauty in dark tourism formation

Abstract

This article intends to discuss the concept of beauty based on Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory and Kant’s notion of the sublime. Classic tourism prioritized an Apollonian sense of beauty, which, with time, yielded to morbid forms where suffering has become the main attraction. The sea and sun product have been replaced by visits to the Holocaust Museum in Auschwitz or other places of pain and death. Therefore, the aesthetic significance inscribed in Adorno’s Marxist philosophy, which poses as a fertile ground to understand the role of the spectacle of disaster in communications, is discussed. Secondly, we delve into how dark tourism is addressed in specialized studies, whether as a new sadist tendency of a society where sensibility for others’ suffering has declined, or as a mechanism to control and rule death. If Frankfurt School and Adorno were concerned by the advance of aesthetics in an increasingly sensual world, no less true is that we need to revisit the roots of dark tourism, which oscillates from the sense of alienation in Industrial world to the logic of emancipation. Starting from the premise that the memory implies freedom, to what extent can we judge this message as an icon of authenticity? Our understanding of Adorno allows us not only to answer these formulated questions, but also clarify the perverse center of dark tourism.