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The Demise of the Avant Garde: Notes on the Sociology of Recent American Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

James S. Ackerman
James S. Ackerman
Affiliation:
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University
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Extract

In a closed and stable society, innovation is likely to be rather feared than welcomed; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was sometimes used as a synonym for ‘revolution’; in an open society like our own, innovation is considered a virtue. In discussing the present condition of art, I want to strip innovation of its value connotations and to consider the search for the new as an historical condition of modern art, but not one that makes it either better or worse than the more stable arts of the past. I suggest a biological metaphor as a guide: in the evolution of species, innovation is not necessarily advantageous. If the conditions of the environment are stable, it is likely that mutants in a species will be selectively eliminated. Conversely, in a changing environment, the appearance of new characters better adjusted to the new conditions will improve the adaptation of the species and be favored by the selective process.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 1969 , pp. 371 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1969

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References

1 In one industrial area in England during the nineteenth century, a species of white moth became dark because predators could spot the white body against a sooty ground, and missed the dark mutants. Any of these moths that turns out to be light or colorful today is out of luck, though the coming of atomic power eventually may give him a great advantage and promote a return to something like the original condition.

2 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).Google Scholar

3 Seitz, W., ‘The Rise and Dissolution of the Avant-Garde’, Vogue, 09 1, 1963, pp. 182 ff.Google Scholar

4 From Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles, Paris, 1825, pp. 341 f.Google Scholar, as quoted by Egbert, Donald (‘The Idea of the “Avant Garde” in Art and Polities’, The American Historical Review, LXXIII, 2, 1967, pp. 339–66)CrossRefGoogle Scholar in an excellent survey of the subject. See also, Poggioli, Renato, Teoria dell'arte d'avanguwdia (Bologna, 1962), pp. 21 ff.Google Scholar, who cites from an essay on the arts written in 1845 by an obscure Fourierist, Gabriel-Desiré Laverdant: ‘Art, the expression of Society, reveals in its highest forms the most advanced social tendencies; it is a precursor and herald. Now, to know whether an art worthily fulfills its proper mission as initiator, if the artist really is at the avant garde, one must know where humanity is heading, what is the destiny of the species … strip nude with a brutal brush all the ugliness, all the garbage that is at the base of our society.’ Poggioli's, book has appeared in translation as The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).Google Scholar

5 Egbert, , op. cit., p. 344Google Scholar, n. 10 cites the first use of the phrase ‘L'art pour l'art’ in the Journal intime of Benjamin Constant, under February 10, 1804, quoting from Rosenblatt, Louise, L'idée de l'art pour l'art (Paris, 1931).Google Scholar

6 E.g., Ronald Bladen, Robert Morris, Tony Smith.

7 A group of New York artists already has begun to hold exhibitions in their own studios as a way of bypassing the usual channels. For a discussion of their motivations, see Goldin, Amy, ‘Look Aloft’, Art News, 05, 1968, pp. 50 ff.Google Scholar