Word: avante
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...idea of the avant-garde had gone. This sudden metamorphosis of one of the popular clichés of art criticism into an unword took a great many people by surprise. For those who still believed that art had some practical revolutionary function, it was as baffling as the evaporation of the American radical left after 1970. But ideas exist for as long as people use them, and by 1976 "avant-garde" was a useless concept: social reality and actual behavior had rendered it obsolete. The ideal-social renewal by cultural challenge-had lasted 100 years, and its vanishing marked...
Nevertheless, the idea of a fusion between radical art and radical politics, of art as a direct means of social subversion and reconstruction, has haunted the avant-garde since Courbet's time. On the face of it, it has a kind of logic. By changing the language of art. you affect the modes of thought; and by changing thought, you change life. The history of the avant-garde up to 1930 was suffused with various, ultimately futile, calls to revolutionary action and moral renewal. They were all formed by the belief that painting and sculpture were still the primary...
...only avant-garde movement in our century that can be shown to have had some formative effect on politics, and even that is debatable, acted on the right, not on the left. It was futurism, whose ideas and rhetoric (rather than the works of art actually painted by Balla, Severini or Boccioni) bodied forth some of the mythology of Italian Fascism. The futurist ethos expressed by Marinetti before World War I, with its cult of speed, male potency, antifeminism and violent struggle, supplied the oratorical framework for Mussolini's rise to power and set the stage for his appearance...
...Artistic avant-gardes wither in totalitarian regimes, whether of the left or the right. The collective efforts of the constructivists Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Tallin and the rest were only possible, one may surmise, because they did not realize how totalitarian Leninism actually was. Oligarchs, whether collective or single, dislike the very idea of avant-garde art because it creates new elites. As Ortega y Gasset remarked, its first effect is to divide; it splits the audience into those who understand it and those who do not. This cleavage does not necessarily run along political lines, and so it may not conform...
...seek such an audience, to think of it as the normal and proper one for avant-garde art, was to take a step back from the ideal of the artist as Public Man that had been embodied in Courbet's career. It meant running for the constituency of the exception and the misfit, not the majority. One main strand of the avantgarde, as it developed in the 19th century and bequeathed its composition to the 20th, hated crowds and democracy, wished to absent itself from the political agora, and stood on its own rights to develop in what Joyce...