The avant-garde sought to dissolve art into life praxis, not integrate art into it

Evidence

For Adorno it is the ‘absoluteness’ of the Modernist work, its abstract, depersonalized, visibly constructed character which allows it to criticize, by allusion, a social world dominated by commodity fetishism, in which social relations are transformed into relations between things. But there is another, more emphatic sense in which Modernism issues in political critique. Bürger argued that what is distinctive about the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century - Dadaism, early Surrealism, post-revolutionary Russian Constructivism - is their ‘attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life-praxis of men’: The avant-gardistes proposed the sublation of art - sublation of art in the Hegelian sense: art was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life, where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 233 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The efforts to recapture the Great Refusal in the language of literature suffer the fate of being absorbed by what they refute. As modern classics, the avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will. This absorption is justified by technical progress; the refusal is refuted by the alleviation of misery in the advanced industrial society. The liquidation of high culture is a byproduct of the conquest of nature, and of the progressing conquest of scarcity. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 319 (#complicates, via linked claim)

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 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The avant-garde attacked art’s institutional status, not merely artistic styles — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 233; Avant-gardes shared an anti-bourgeois stance against market culture — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 217; avant-garde shock loses its subversive force once it becomes expected and institutionalized — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 564 (+5 more)

Related

• The avant-garde attacked art’s institutional status, not merely artistic styles (similarity 0.94)
• avant-garde shock loses its subversive force once it becomes expected and institutionalized (similarity 0.90)
• Avant-gardes shared an anti-bourgeois stance against market culture (similarity 0.84)
• The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society (similarity 0.84)
• Avant-garde death followed the loss of the anticipated revolution (similarity 0.83)
• Avant-garde retained aestheticism’s rejection but aimed to build new life-praxis from art. (similarity 0.83)
• Technology’s unification of all arts will expose the identity behind industrial culture (similarity 0.82)
• Avant-garde movements are defined by seeking to abolish art’s separation from life (similarity 0.81)
• So-called postmodern trends merely continue capitalist processes begun under modernism (similarity 0.81)
• Avant-garde art depends on concrete political conditions, not just aesthetic logic (similarity 0.81)
• The neo-avant-garde completed the original avant-garde project by attacking art institutions (similarity 0.81)
• Avant-garde culture thrives where administration has not fully taken hold (similarity 0.81)
• Adorno’s negative dialectics located emancipation’s hints in modern art’s distortion (similarity 0.80)
• Modernist art criticizes capitalism by mirroring commodity form rather than denying it (similarity 0.80)
• Conceptual art subverted the market system that promoted avant-garde objects (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• The avant-garde attacked art’s institutional status, not merely artistic styles #corroborates (0.85) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 233
• The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society #complicates (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 319
• avant-garde shock loses its subversive force once it becomes expected and institutionalized #qualifies (0.78) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 564
• Avant-gardes shared an anti-bourgeois stance against market culture #corroborates (0.75) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 217
• Avant-garde death followed the loss of the anticipated revolution #responds-to (0.72) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 253