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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, René 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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Raphael Sassower, Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Colorada, Colorado Springs, is author of
Technoscientific Angst: Ethics and Responsibility and
Cultural Collisions: Postmodern Technoscience. Louis
Cicotello is Professor of Visual and Performing Arts at the
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where he teaches
studio and art history classes.
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