“The effect of strangeness, infusing an encounter with the unfamiliar and the unknown, was employed by Brecht to alienate the audience and make them aware that the institutions and social formulae they inherit are not eternal or natural but historical, man-made, and so capable of change through human action.”
Adorno adds: a successful work of art is not one that resolves contradictions into a false harmony, but one that expresses the idea of harmony negatively, embodying contradictions, pure and un-compromised, within its very structure.
Paraphrasing Nietzsche: The task of art is to bring chaos into order. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche presents the famous polarity between the Dionysian (chaos, intoxication, primordial flux) and the Apollonian (form, order, individuation). Art, for him, is the fusion of these forces — giving form to the chaos of existence.