What was the avant-garde?
THE AVANT-GARDE WAS A MODERN THING. It came in the middle of the nineteenth century, circa 1848, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, as the proletariat multiplied and the democratic spirit became enamored of the absolutist state under the bewitching spell of the antagonism of capital and labor. As the art critic Clement Greenberg noted in his classic essay, “Avant Garde and Kitsch”:
One and the same civilization produces simultaneously such different things as a poem by T.
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