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The Golden Avant-Garde: Idolatry, Commercialism, and Art, by Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, University Press of Virginia, 147 pp.; $17.50, paper
The central conceit of this book, signaled in the "golden" quality of the "avant-garde" as well as first word of the subtitle, is the golden calf wrought by Israel as Moses tarried on Sinai in the presence of the mysterious and terrible Jahweh. Down below, left to themselves, consumed in the ordinary, the people wanted Aaron to fashion an idol to replace the vanished leader and his God.
In the biblical telling, of course, this act of idolatry is condemned and punished, but Raphael Sassower (a philosopher) and Louis Cicotello (an artist) had a different moral in mind when they appropriated the story. In our time, Sassower and Cicotello say, "we have lost our trust in religious institutions as a means to a spiritual end," and hence "we desperately need art, among other cultural expressions," to take the place of religion—to produce golden calves, as it were, offering "alternative means through which to reach our spiritual destiny."
In short, Sassower and Cicotello are all for idolatry—but not just any idolatry will do. They want to persuade readers to reject the naïve form of idolatry inscribed in the myth of the avant-garde and the cult of the genius, illusions in which artists and their public are complicit. The purpose of art is not redemption. The artist has no magic wand, is neither a glorious savior nor a gloomy prophet with divine law in hand. None of that works anymore. Instead, the authors call for an ironic, disenchanted form of idolatry.
Sassower and Cicotello are at their most persuasive in undercutting the pretensions of the avant-garde. This is a French term meaning "advance guard," originally a military movement of mounted soldiers who charge the opposing infantry in order to break a hole through which their own rank-and-file infantry can follow. In the early nineteenth century, the term was applied to artists by Henri de Saint-Simon, a utopian thinker and proponent of Enlightenment. Saint-Simon announced that universal progress lay in the hands of artists and intellectuals, who could provide the cultural inspiration and leadership toward social improvement and cultural refinement.
Avant-garde art has been defined in many and often conflicting ways since then—sometimes in terms of the romantic cult of genius, at other times as the work of bohemians who delight in bad-mouthing bourgeois respectability, and on still other occasions as the revolutionary efforts of radical (Marxist or anarchist) artists from Gustave Courbet to the surrealist André Breton. Today it often means little more than this month's enfant terrible, who has snatched artworld headlines for having done something outlandish like mutilating his genitals or exhibiting a cow's carcass in formaldehyde.
Sassower and Cicotello happily wish to recover a constructive use of the term. They expose the sleight of hand whereby the avant-garde artist is magically extracted from the commercial reality of capitalism and the marketplace. If the bohemian and the radical artist were supposed to have transcended market forces by boldly dismissing state and church patronage, nevertheless their work was commissioned, purchased, and collected by the wealthy and by museums. Art dealers intermediated artists (who came to create their work on speculation and place it on consignment in galleries) and the "public," which consisted of growing numbers of patrons who acquired works of art for the love of collecting, but also, increasingly, for the purpose of investment and eventual resale. Sassower and Cicotello are prudently critical of any version of the avant-garde which refuses to recognize that artists are "fully enmeshed in the overwhelming powers of the culture of capitalism."
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