Ironically, today’s avant-gardists themselves hardly ever use the term
avant-garde. Postmodern, or postmodernist, is preferred, but even more
common is contemporary. The artworld ignores the original sense of
that term, however, which is simply “occurring, or existing, at the same
period of time.” In the latter part of the twentieth century, the term took
on the meaning of “modern” as in “contemporary furniture” and “con-
temporary art.” The Department of Contemporary Art at Boston’s ven-
erable Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), for example, at one point noted that,
while it began in 1971 by “avidly pursuing the works of color-field
[abstract] painters of the day,” it had since “broadened its definition of
Contemporary Art to include work from 1955 through the present.”^8 Not
allsuch work, however, certainly not academic or Classical Realist
painting or sculpture. Contemporary art museums throughout the world,
in fact, focus exclusively on such avant-garde forms as “conceptual art,”
“installation art,” “video,” abstract work, and so-called painting and
sculpture that is “realist” yet still not art.^9
An Early Warning
It is worth recalling here the sober admonition voiced in 1912 (about a
year after the Russian modernist Wassily Kandinsky produced one of the
first completely abstract paintings) by the noted painter and critic
Kenyon Cox. In a remarkable paper entitled “The Illusion of Progress”
(an historical overview of poetry, architecture, music, sculpture, and
painting), delivered before a joint meeting of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts, Cox declared that he
and his fellow Academicians were to some degree “believers in
progress,” who saw their golden age “no longer in the past, but in the
future.” He then observed:
[A]s the pace of progress in science and in material things has become more
and more rapid, we have come to expect a similar pace in arts and letters, to
imagine that the art of the future must be far finer than the art of the present
or than that of the past, and that the art of one decade, or even one year, must
supersede that of the preceding decade or the preceding year.... More than
ever before “To have done is to hang quite out of fashion,” and the only title
to consideration is to do something quite obviously new or to proclaim one’s
intention of doing something newer. The race grows madder and madder.As Cox noted, just two years after he and his audience had first heard of
Cubism (invented by Picasso and Braque in 1907), the Futurists were
The Interminable Monopoly of the Avante-Garde 167