Schiller had earlier decried: art as a matter of decoration, entertainment, or
escape that is–so the avant-garde argued–“unassociated with the life praxis
of men.”^50 In reaction, to make art political or at any rate something not fit
primarily for consumption in either wealthy individual homes or museums
as places of consolation, there hence arose what Gregg Horowitz calls“the
characteristic procedures of the interwar avant-garde manifestations: art by
chance, art by collective production, art in the streets, the mixing of artistic
media, and so on.”^51 These procedures were specifically intended to chal-
lenge and negate any conception of art as autonomous from a sociopolitical
life that remained structured by oppositions (including oppositions between
businessman art consumers seeking consolation and bohemian political
artists).
After 1945 and as both the collection and production of art became
increasingly structured by mass media attention to what is new and interest-
ing, avant-gardism tended to collapse into what Bürger characterizes as a
“neo-avant-garde that institutionalizes theavant-garde as artand thus negates
genuinely avant-garde intentions.”^52 Or as Fredric Jameson puts it, at some
point after 1945–“the early 1960s, one would think”–works distinctively
informed by the oppositional aesthetics of modernism and avant-gardism
became co-opted as displaying just another available and acceptable style,
“established in the academy and...henceforth felt to be academic by a whole
new generation of poets, painters, and musicians.”^53
One possible consequence of this development is, as Jameson puts it, that
“it is no longer clear what the artists and writers of the present period are
supposed to be doing,” in as much as all possible distinctively personal
visions and styles have“already been invented,”^54 marketed and used up:
what is left is only pastiche, marketing, and cultural drift. But a second,
opposed possible consequence is to up the ante on opposition to dominant
culture and to the autonomy of art. Peter Osborne takes this latter stance to
be the strategy of both conceptual art from the late 1960s on and what he
(^50) Ibid.
(^51) Gregg Horowitz,“Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde,”inThe Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics,
ed. Levinson, pp. 748–60 at p. 755.
(^52) Bürger,Theory of the Avant-Garde,p.58.
(^53) Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic,
ed. Foster, pp. 111–25 at p. 124.
(^54) Ibid., p. 115.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 269