Is it time to admit that avant-garde is a phenomenon of the 19h and 20th century? Camille Paglia think so:
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It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead.
It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all
the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans)
that most artists had stubbornly scorned.
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Moreover,
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Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological
environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from
beautifully engineered industrial design. Personalized hand-held devices
are their letters, diaries, telephones and newspapers, as well as their
round-the-clock conduits for music, videos and movies. But there is no
spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.
Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most
talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt
for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges
possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as
reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract
artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored
or suppressed.
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I quote from Camille Paglia's essay "How Capitalism Can Save Art" in the Wall Street Journal, October 6-7, 2012, p. C3.
It may also be "high time" to retire that impoverished term post-modernist, that sad token of belatedness, which has lost any of the descriptive power it may once have had, -- DL
