An analytic summary of The Theory of the Avant-Garde by Peter Burger
The concept of the avant-garde is still today an area of contentionsince its initial cultural formulation by Saint-Simon in 1825. One of themost important works to emerge that added to the contemporary debate on theavant-garde and post-modernism was the classic work by Peter Burger, TheTheory of the Avant- Garde. While this work had a profound impact on artand literary theory and on discussions about the European avant-garde, ithas in recent years been criticized on a number of levels. The central argument in Burger's book centers on the meaning anddefinition of the term avant-garde and how the concept of the avant-gardediffered from modernism. These are crucial issues for Burger, which heoutlines in this work. Central to The Theory of the Avant-Garde is theargument that the concept of the term - avant-garde - should be understoodas an awareness of the pitfalls of modernism and a radical attack on thedominant institutions of art and literature. According to Burger the aim ofavant-garde should be to re-integrate art into life and to do away witharts adherence to and association with ideologies and established
Many also felt that Burger's views onthe avant-garde were too heavily theoretically-biased towards politics,which distorted the aesthetic viewpoint. He states that modernism is defined interms of its consistent and continuous adherence to the concept ofaesthetic autonomy. Burger relies to a large extent on the thinking of Theodore Adorno tosituate his argument in the context on contemporary thought. According to Burger, modernism ismainly concerned with the developing and evolution of formal style in artand literature, which is a continuation and repetition of the past. One criticism is that the idea of destroyingart institutions that ideologically bolstered modernism was impractical andwould only result in the destruction of the art object itself. This refers to the cardinal characteristic ofmodernism, which is the assumption that the value of art as "high art" isdetermined by its distance from and transcendence of popular or massculture. In essence then the book points out that the central aspect of theavant-garde and its main mission is to undermine the autonomy of art andrestore art's role as social praxis. While his work was hugely influentialin establishing a critique of modernism and in charting the course towardspost-modernism, there have been many critiques of his extreme separation ofmodernism and the avant-garde. Essentially it is Burger'sinsistence that avant-garde art must either break and destroy its parentinstitutions or lose the essence of the avant-garde that has led tocriticism of his views. Burger makes it clear that hesees modernism as a "reactionary phenomenon" and therefore is essentiallyconservative. This conception of modernism was promulgated by formalist criticssuch as Clement Greenberg. He thereforestates that "the distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends,and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept ofautonomy" (p. Burger emphatically states that the object of the avant-garde is to destroy the 'privileging" of modernist art, which seeks toraise itself above common culture. Hisview of the avant-garde is that it is a radical break and change inworldview.
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