avant-garde shock loses its subversive force once it becomes expected and institutionalized

Evidence

Adorno himself believed that ‘among the dangers threatening modern art, not least is that it is becoming inoffensive.’ One form taken by this danger is what Russell Berman calls ‘the obsolescence of shock’. The shock produced by the designed incoherence of avant-garde works of art was, Peter Bürger argues, intended to ‘direct the reader’s attention to the fact that the conduct of one’s life is questionable and that it is necessary to change it.’ But ‘[n]othing loses its effectiveness more quickly than shock; by its very nature, it is a unique experience. As a result of repetition, it changes fundamentally: there is such a thing as expected shock … The shock is “consumed”.’ As Modernism came to represent the norm of high culture, so techniques used by the avant-garde movements to subvert the institution of art itself were recuperated. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 564

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Jameson’s claim that postmodernism is the ‘cultural logic’ where modernism’s critique has been absorbed; also connects to the reader’s prior work on canonical cultural critique losing its edge. — connects to: The demand for novelty paradoxically strengthens the conventions it appears to escape — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 100; The avant-garde sought to dissolve art into life praxis, not integrate art into it; The avant-garde attacked art’s institutional status, not merely artistic styles — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 233 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Avant-garde productions can fail when they lose their original infrastructural and class conditions. #expands (0.82) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1507
• Avant-garde culture thrives where administration has not fully taken hold #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 166
• Postmodern cultures lack a stylistic norm that modernist deviation presupposed #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 76
• Contemporary art exhausted stylistic innovation and collapsed into speculation and irony #complicates (0.78) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 725
• The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society #exemplifies (0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 319
• Avant-garde scene organizers depended on patronage and promotion that often failed #expands (0.72) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 961