_If an empirically oriented aesthetics uses quantitative averages as norms, it unconsciously sides with social conformity. What such an aesthetics classifies as pleasing or painful is never a sensual given of nature but something preformed by society as a whole, by what it sanctions and censors, and this has always been challenged by artistic production. _
Theodor Adorno, "Aesthetic Theory", p.267 (Athlone), p.347 (Continuum).