Books, Arts & Manners: The Chic of the New

WHEN AN issue becomes the subject of the lead article in the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section, you can be fairly certain that the purported controversy had long ago been exhaustively dissected and dismissed in the real world. Such was the case with Times cultural reporter Richard Bernstein’s September 30 investigation into the current state of experimental art, which posed the question: “Is there an avant-garde at all these days?” and, in typical fence-straddling Times fashion, came up with the less-than-illuminating reply, “Probably yes.” (Even the headlines refused to take a stand, the page-one banner firmly stating, “Why the Cutting Edge Has Lost Its Bite,” the continuation meekly inquiring, “Has the Avant-Garde Lost Its Bite?”

What causes Mr. Bernstein to question the very existence of a contemporary avant-garde seems to have less to do with the art itself than with the fact that those who consider themselves “cultural rebels” accept financial support from the “establishment” and perform at “mainstream” venues. But the canard of the supposed hostility of the middle classes to avantgarde art was laid to rest long ago. Robert Hughes, in his 1981 history of modern art, The Shock of the New, traces the roots of the avant-garde to the change in patronage between the anciens régimes, with their centralization of acceptable taste, and the free-market equivalent in the nineteenth-century French salon, with its “veritable Babel of competing images, styles, and manners,” which was made possible by the rise of the European bourgeoisie and capitalist democracy.

ER

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Eva Resnikova

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WHEN AN issue becomes the subject of the lead article in the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section, you can be fairly certain that the purported controversy had long ago been exhaustively dissected and dismissed in the real world. Such was the case with Times cultural reporter Richard Bernstein’s September 30 investigation into the current state of experimental art, which posed the question: “Is there an avant-garde at all these days?” and, in typical fence-straddling Times fashion, came up with the less-than-illuminating reply, “Probably yes.” (Even the headlines refused to take a stand, the page-one banner firmly stating, “Why the Cutting Edge Has Lost Its Bite,” the continuation meekly inquiring, “Has the Avant-Garde Lost Its Bite?”

What causes Mr. Bernstein to question the very existence of a contemporary avant-garde seems to have less to do with the art itself than with the fact that those who consider themselves “cultural rebels” accept financial support from the “establishment” and perform at “mainstream” venues. But the canard of the supposed hostility of the middle classes to avantgarde art was laid to rest long ago. Robert Hughes, in his 1981 history of modern art, The Shock of the New, traces the roots of the avant-garde to the change in patronage between the anciens régimes, with their centralization of acceptable taste, and the free-market equivalent in the nineteenth-century French salon, with its “veritable Babel of competing images, styles, and manners,” which was made possible by the rise of the European bourgeoisie and capitalist democracy.