The abortive integration of art and everyday life: the historical avant-garde and its failures
The abortive integration of art and everyday life: the historical avant-garde and its failures

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents the historical avant-garde as a linchpin of modern art and as a standard against which every succeeding art movement must define itself. It further discusses the radical nature of avant-garde's critical negativity that hoped to transcend the "institution of modern autonomous art" (Peter Burger) . The avantgarde's critique of art with extra-artistic means, e .g. an affiliation with radical political parties, helped turn the style of (modern) art into the (postmodern) art of lifestyle. The avantgarde thus failed to integrate art into everyday life in the name of social change. What followed was a dissolution of modern art into commercialized aesthetic practice of postmodern art. In it, an individual could no longer se a promesse de bonheur that was merely suspended in everyday life, as it was still possible in the works of autonomous modern art.

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