Is the Avant-Garde Still Avant-Garde?

• “An avant-garde likes to present itself as insurgent and radical, yet the logic of the metaphor suggests that a new group will soon be coming along to replace it. Today’s avant-garde is always liable to congeal into tomorrow’s orthodoxy.” ⤴️
• “This was not simply a matter of painting differently or of propounding a theory of radical rupture with the past; it involved a set of conditions that enabled a number of artists to become “a collectivity somewhere between a group and a movement,” with its own material basis and social relations.” ⤴️
• “Though various self-styled “radical” artists had, in earlier years, attempted to find a necessary link between the form of their art and their preferred political and social loyalties, that was not the determining characteristic of the artistic avant-garde in France.” ⤴️
• “if the explicit motto of aestheticism was “art for art’s sake,” then the implicit motto of the avant-garde was “technie for technie’s sake,” where technie was distinguished from the more general term technique in being relentlessly focused on innovation through reconfiguring the elements of the medium itself.” ⤴️
• “their commitment to making technical experiments informed by the most recent ideas about perception, color, and so on—that marked their distinctiveness.” ⤴️
• “driven more by the goal of expanding the range of visual possibilities than by any large political or cultural position-taking” ⤴️
• “closer integration in London of experimental art with elite social circles, where the right kind of radical chic could provide a form of cultural capital for ambitious patrons and hostesses.” ⤴️
• “In Cottington’s terms, the avant-garde was “endogenous” in Paris because it had the infrastructure to support autonomous art movements and groupings. In London, it was “exogenous,” because it relied on interaction with other social forces and structures, notably the aesthetically inclined or raffish element of the aristocracy.” ⤴️
• “Even this short-lived movement—more a series of gestures or explosions than a structured campaign—could not resist the embrace of aristocratic patronage and the seductions of mere decoration, and so it never fully attained the social and aesthetic autonomy of its Parisian counterpart.” ⤴️
• “If the avant-garde was inextricably tied to the cluster of circumstances in pre-1914 Paris that Cottington identifies, what becomes of the concept, and the formation it describes, as circumstances change?” ⤴️
• “there is a risk that the validation of avant-garde art implicit in this book may prove to be coercive—that it comes to tilt the language of appraisal too much in its favor.” ⤴️
• “must we conclude that its softer virtues are somehow trumped by Picasso’s radical technical innovations? Why is “shocking alterity” to be preferred to something more immediately recognizable?” ⤴️
• “the old “story of art” trajectory, which always threatens to become a teleology, an account of the necessary journey toward abstraction?” ⤴️
• “it would be a pity if it were to reinforce, however indirectly, a tendency to prioritize art that is seen as somehow moving the story “forward.”” ⤴️
• “Only with the OED’s completely revised 1989 edition was the meaning with which we are now more familiar added: “the pioneers or innovators in any art in a particular period,” with a first usage of this sense dated to 1910. The fact that the dictionary’s illustrative example comes from that year should alert us to the term’s connection with a particular historical moment, while the retention of the French form also ought to signal something about its original cultural setting.” ⤴️
• “There is a long tradition, often going back to the preferred self-descriptions of some of the participants, of seeing the avant-garde as not just protesting against the commercial criteria of the art market but actually stepping outside all such constraints, challenging the whole economic system from a position of proud self-exclusion. This notion of a defining “outsiderism” has been vital to the self-flatteringly romantic view of the innovators in several arts, yet it always falsifies a more complex position: All outsiders are insiders somewhere.” ⤴️
• “the activities of even the most innovative painters were embedded in a dense network of small dealers and galleristes, independent art schools, and les petites revues that discussed and promoted their work. “By the beginning of the decade before the First World War,” he writes, “a sector of the contemporary market had become established in Paris that provided the infrastructure upon which an artistic avant-garde was able to build both a collective identity as professionals distinct from the mainstream and to make a living.”” ⤴️
• “This process is part of what distinguished the Parisian avant-garde from various “brotherhoods” and “cenacles” that had been established earlier in the century. These latter groups had largely been based on affective ties: They were forms of fellowship built on friendship and shared ideals, whereas the avant-garde, in Cottington’s view, was a group of professionals instrumentally seeking a certain kind of market advantage through technical innovation. This economic purpose distinguished the avant-garde from another social phenomenon with which it is sometimes confused: bohemianism. Though bohemians flaunted their ostensible rejection of bourgeois norms, they did not constitute a formation committed to sustaining an alternative professional practice. Bohemianism was a gesture, often a temporary one undertaken by young men (rarely women) who would soon revert to inherited respectability; belonging to the avant-garde, by contrast, was a career move.” ⤴️
• “over the course of the 20th century, the locus of such relentless technical innovation moved from Paris to New York, with a succession of theoretically driven “isms” marking the increasingly ambitious and fundamental—though also, to some eyes, increasingly willful—experiments with form.” ⤴️
• “the avant-garde became the new art establishment.” ⤴️