Death of the avant-garde  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 12:25, 24 April 2014

The death of the avant-garde runs paralel to the death of modernism. Charles Jencks noted that "Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite."

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The Painted Word

Many critics have declared the avant-garde dead. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Eric Hobsbawn, Roland Barthes, Andreas Huyssen, Frank Kermode and Robert Hughes are some of the scholars and critics who have relegated the avant-garde to the past.

Most frequently cited perhaps is The Aporias of the Avant-Garde (1962), an extended essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in which he said that "the avant of the avant-garde contains its own contradiction: it can be marked out only a posteriori."

Camille Paglia proclaimed the avant-garde dead in the 1990s. Her argument is stated in a 1999 salon.com response to a reader's question:

"It's a central thesis of my work that in the 20th century (which I call the Age of Hollywood) pagan popular culture overtook and vanquished the high arts. Thanks to advances in technology, pop became a universal language, as catholic in its reach as the medieval church. Once pop art embraced commercial iconography, the avant-garde was dead."

Several contemporary critics have argued that the avant-garde is not dead. They cite punk rock as a new resurgence of avant-garde sensibilities and offer that there will always be transgressive artists ahead of their time, destined to be discovered and re-evaluated after their death.

Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes:

"Where did this new academy begin? At its origins the avant-garde myth had held the artist to be a precursor; the significant work is the one that prepares the future. The cult of the precursor ended by cluttering the landscape with absurd prophetic claims. The idea of a cultural avant-garde was unimaginable before 1800. It was fostered by the rise of liberalism. Where the taste of religious or secular courts determined patronage, "subversive" innovation was not esteemed as a sign of artistic quality. Nor was the artist's autonomy, that would come with the Romantics." --Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New

See also

• The Aporias of the Avant-Garde, 1962, an extended essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
• Death of the Author, 1967, an extended essay by Roland Barthes
• "The Death of Avant-Garde Literature", 1964, an essay by Leslie Fiedler.
• The Age of the Avant-Garde (1973) by Hilton Kramer
• Death of the underground
• Death of Modernism
• Nobrow