What They Said #1: Theodor Adorno

"The prologue to Shiller's Wallenstein ends with the line, 'Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst' - life is serious, art is lighthearted. It is modeled on a line from Ovid's Tristia: 'Vita verecunda est, Musa jocosa mihi' (II, 354), or 'My life is modest and sober, my muse is happy.' Perhaps one may impute an intent to Ovid, the charming and artful classical writer. He whose life was so lighthearted that the Augustian Roman establishment could not tolerate it, was winking at his patrons, composing his lightheartedness back into the literary gaiety of the Ars amandi and repentantly letting it be seen that he personally was concerned with the serious conduct of life... The art that moves ahead into the unknown, the only art now possible, is neither lighthearted nor serious; the third possibility, however, is cloaked in obscurity, as though embedded in a void the figures of which are traced by advanced works of art." (Theodor Adorno)

Good thing he doesn't actually claim art is lighthearted.