THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE:
The New York Art World, 1940-1985
Diana Crane
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
194 pp., $24.95
Art history has tended to focus on what may be termed the technical aspects of painting: the artist's treatment of form, line, color, and space. Diana Crane, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, undertakes a different approach--to examine art as a social phenomenon. The idea is not new. Even traditional art history assumes that a given style reflects particular social milieu even if the explanation of that relationship rarely goes beyond vague generalities about the spirit of the time. From the first, according to the concept of the avant-garde, the artist was seen as playing the dual part of aesthetic innovator and social prophet.
The term "avant-garde," with its accompanying vision of the artistic role, was coined by the early nineteenth century French utopian socialist Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon. In the Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles (1825), Saint-Simon's artist proclaims:
It is we, artists, who will serve you as avant-garde: the power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas... and in that way above all we exert an electric and victorious influence. We address ourselves to the imagination and to the sentiments of mankind, we should therefore always exercise the liveliest and most decisive action.... What a most beautiful destiny for the arts, that of exercising over society a positive power, a true priestly function, and of marching forcefully in the vanguard of all the intellectual faculties, in the epoch of their greatest development! This is the duty of artists, this their mission.
Avant-gardism in the arts has historically gone hand in hand with alienation from the values and life-style of the middle class, but there have been major exceptions to this linkage of artistic with political radicalism. Even many of those hostile by temperament or ideology to bourgeois society experience a tension between conflicting priorities--whether their primary loyalty should be to art as an instrument for social advance or to art for art's sake. Accordingly, Crane adopts a broadly inclusive definition for avant-garde. "In this book," she explains, "I will argue that each new art movement redefines some aspect of the aesthetic content of art, the social content of art, or the norms surrounding the production of artworks." According to Crane, an art movement should be considered avant-garde in its approach to aesthetic content if it does any of the following: reshapes artistic conventions, uses new artistic tools and techniques, or redefines the nature of the art object. A movement is avant-garde in its approach to social content if it incorporates in its work social or political values critical of or different from those of the majority culture, redefines the relationship between high and popular culture, or adopts a critical attitude toward artistic institutions. A movement is avant-garde in its approach to the production and distribution of art; if it redefines the social context (e.g., appropriate critics, role models, and audience) for the production of art; reshapes the organizational context in which art is created, displayed,
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