Since the eighteenth century, artists--especially so-called
avant-garde artists--have played a conflicting role in society.
Part of the reason for their complex position, argue Raphael
Sassower and Louis Cicotello, is the survival of the culture of
idolatry in the modern age. In the twentieth century, artists can
criticize the worship of material things or they can produce the
things themselves. They can paint the scenes of worship of the
golden calf--as the German expressionist Emil Nolde did in "Dance
Around the Golden Calf" (1910), in which garish exaggerations
reflect a condemnation of materialistic culture--or they can be the
ones fabricating the idol for a fee.
Part radical critics, part celebrity servants of bourgeois
tastes, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte,
Andy Warhol, the Christos, and Keith Haring have captured the
twentieth-century imagination and inspired the artistic community
to reconsider its social, political, and cultural roles. Charting
the uneasy middle ground occupied by these artists and their work,
Sassower and Cicotello argue that their success has as much to do
with their complicity with capitalist forces as it does with their
defiance of them. Indeed, the major theme of The Golden Avant-Garde
is the inability of any cultural subgroup to withstand the
overwhelming power of capitalism, commercialism, and science and
technology.
While some artists are paid by governments and institutions to
construct national and religious monuments that express and honor
society's most valuable principles and goals, the same society has
fabricated a romantic myth of artists as revolutionary heroes who
defy the authorities and pay dearly for their passion and vision.
The Golden Avant-Garde is a unique collaboration between a
philosopher and an artist, who bring their different perspectives
to bear on how the avant-garde navigates the cultural, financial,
and technological challenges presented by this postmodern dilemma.
Often, Sassower and Cicotello conclude, avant-garde artists have
become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to
exaggerate and articulate in their work.
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