Editing Avant-garde (section)

==Society and the avant-garde==
{{see also|Media culture|Spectacle (critical theory)}}
[[File:Marcel Duchamp, 1917, Fountain, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.jpg|thumb|right|250px|The cultural provocation of avant-garde art: ''[[Fountain (Duchamp)|Fountain]]'' (1917) by [[Marcel Duchamp]].<br> ([[Alfred Stieglitz]])]]
[[File:Walter_Benjamin_vers_1928.jpg|thumb|right|250px|In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), Walter Benjamin addresses the artistic and cultural, social, economic, and political functions of art in a capitalist society.]]
[[File:AdornoHorkheimerHabermasbyJeremyJShapiro2.png|thumb|right|300px|Intellectuals of the avant-garde: Max Horkheimer (left) and Theodor Adorno (right) at Heidelberg in 1965.]]

Sociologically, as a stratum of the [[intelligentsia]] of a society, ''avant-garde'' artists, writers, architects, ''et al.'' produce artefacts — works of art, books, buildings — that [[Intellectualism|intellectually and ideologically]] oppose the conformist value system of mainstream society.<ref>"avant-garde", ''Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory'' Third Edition (1991) J.A. Cuddon, Ed. p.74.</ref> In the essay "[[Avant-Garde and Kitsch]]" ([[1939]]), [[Clement Greenberg]] said that the artistic vanguard oppose high culture and reject the artifice of [[mass culture]], because the avant-garde functionally oppose the [[dumbing down]] of society — be it with [[low culture]] or with [[high culture]]. That in a capitalist society each medium of mass communication is a factory producing artworks, and is not a legitimate artistic medium; therefore, the products of mass culture are ''[[kitsch]]'', simulations and simulacra of Art.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Greenberg |first=Clement |date=Fall 1939 |title=Avant-Garde and Kitsch |url=http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/search/detail?id=283920 |magazine=The Partisan Review |pages=34–49 |volume=6 |issue=5 |access-date=24 January 2018 |archive-date=4 July 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180704213419/http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/search/detail?id=283920 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

Walter Benjamin in the essay "[[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction]]" (1939) and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the ''[[Dialectic of Enlightenment]]'' (1947) said that the artifice of [[mass culture]] voids the artistic value (the ''aura'') of a work of art.<ref>Walter Benjamin, "[http://bid.berkeley.edu/bidclass/readings/benjamin.html The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction]" {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061205013822/http://bid.berkeley.edu/bidclass/readings/benjamin.html |date=5 December 2006 }}{{Full citation needed|date=June 2017}}</ref> That the capitalist [[culture industry]] (publishing and music, radio and cinema, etc.) continually produces artificial culture for mass consumption,<ref name="www.sociosite.net">{{Cite book|first=Theodor|last=Adorno|chapter=Culture industry reconsidered|title=The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture|place=London|publisher=Routledge|year=1991|orig-year=1975|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180929171800/http://www.sociosite.net/topics/texts/adorno_culture_reconsidered.pdf|archive-date=29 September 2018|chapter-url=https://www.sociosite.net|access-date=16 March 2023|url-status=dead}}</ref> which is facilitated by mechanically produced art-products of mediocre quality displacing art of quality workmanship; thus, the profitability of [[Commodity fetishism|art-as-commodity]] determines its artistic value.<ref name="www.sociosite.net" />

In ''[[The Society of the Spectacle]]'' (1967), [[Guy Debord]] said that the financial, commercial, and economic co-optation of the avant-garde into a commodity produced by [[neoliberal capitalism]] makes doubtful that avant-garde artists will remain culturally and intellectually relevant to their societies for preferring profit to cultural change and political progress. In ''The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde'' (1991), [[Paul Mann]] said that the avant-garde are economically integral to the contemporary institutions of the Establishment, specifically as part of the [[culture industry]].<ref>Richard Schechner, "The Conservative Avant-Garde." ''New Literary History'' 41.4 (Autumn 2010): 895–913.</ref> Noting the conceptual shift, theoreticians, such as [[Matei Calinescu]], in ''Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism'' (1987),<ref>{{Cite book |last=Wang |first=Veria |title=Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism Avant-Garde Decadence Kitsch |date=25 December 1987 |url=https://www.academia.edu/10347423 |access-date=14 September 2022 |archive-date=15 January 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230115063717/https://www.academia.edu/10347423 |url-status=live |publisher=[[Duke University Press]] |isbn=0-8223-0726-X |oclc=827754153}}</ref> and Hans Bertens in ''The Idea of the Postmodern: A History'' (1995),<ref>{{Cite web |title=The Idea of the Postmodern: A History |url=https://www.routledge.com/The-Idea-of-the-Postmodern-A-History/Bertens/p/book/9780415060127 |access-date=14 September 2022 |website=Routledge & CRC Press |language=en |archive-date=7 June 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220607192138/https://www.routledge.com/The-Idea-of-the-Postmodern-A-History/Bertens/p/book/9780415060127 |url-status=live }}</ref> said that Western culture entered a post-modern time when the [[modernist]] ways of thought and action and the production of art have become redundant in a capitalist economy.<ref>Calinescu 1987,{{page needed|date=September 2012}}; Bertens 1995.{{page needed|date=September 2012}}</ref>

Parting from the claims of Greenberg in the late 1930s and the insights of Poggioli in the early 1960s, in ''The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks'' (1983), the critic [[Harold Rosenberg]] said that since the middle of the 1960s the politically progressive avant-garde ceased being adversaries to artistic commercialism and the mediocrity of [[mass culture]], which political disconnection transformed being an artist into "a profession, one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing [the profession of being an artist]."<ref>Rosenberg, Harold. ''The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 219. {{ISBN|0-226-72673-8}}</ref><ref>Dickie, George. "[http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Arts/Arts-idx?type=turn&id=Arts.ArtsSocv12i2&entity=Arts.ArtsSocv12i2.p0074&isize=text "Symposium on Marxist Aesthetic Thought: Commentary on the Papers by Rudich, San Juan, and Morawski] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130530091349/http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Arts/Arts-idx?type=turn&id=Arts.ArtsSocv12i2&entity=Arts.ArtsSocv12i2.p0074&isize=text |date=30 May 2013 }}", ''Arts in Society: Art and Social Experience: Our Changing Outlook on Culture'' 12, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 1975): p. 232.</ref>

Avant-garde is frequently defined in contrast to ''arrière-garde'', which in its original military sense refers to a [[rearguard]] force that protects the advance-guard.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Adamson|first1=Natalie|first2=Toby|last2=Norris|chapter=Introduction|title=Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-Garde: Defining Modern and Transitional in France|editor1-first=Natalie|editor1-last=Adamson|editor2-first=Toby|editor2-last=Norris|publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing|year=2009|page=18}}</ref> The term was less frequently used than "avant-garde" in 20th-century art criticism.{{sfn|Adamson|Norris|2009|pp=17–18}} The art historians Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris argue that ''arrière-garde'' is not reducible to a [[kitsch]] style or [[reactionary]] orientation, but can instead be used to refer to artists who engage with the legacy of the avant-garde while maintaining an awareness that doing so is in some sense anachronistic.{{sfn|Adamson|Norris|2009|pp=18–19, 20}} The critic [[Charles Altieri]] argues that avant-garde and arrière-garde are interdependent: "where there is an avant-garde, there must be an ''arrière-garde''."<ref>{{cite journal|last=Altieri|first=Charles|authorlink=Charles Altieri|title=Avant-Garde or Arrière-Garde in Recent American Poetry|journal=[[Poetics Today]]|volume=20|issue=4|year=1999|page=633|jstor=1773194}}</ref>