Death of the avant-garde
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Many have pronounced the avant-garde dead. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Eric Hobsbawn, Roland Barthes, Susan Gablik, Andreas Huyssen, James S. Ackerman, George T. Noszlopy, Frank Kermode and Robert Hughes are but some scholars and critics who have relegated the avant-garde to the past.
Conservative American art critic Hilton Kramer wrote about the death of the avant-gardes in his The Age of the Avant-Garde (1973). He situates the avant-garde from the 1850s (Courbet) until the 1950s (abstract expressionism) and defines it as art that meets with resistance from society at large.
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.
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