29-621: Ludvík Kundera (22 March 1920 – 17 August 2010) was a Czech writer, translator, poet, playwright, editor and literary historian. He was a notable exponent of Czech avant-garde literature and a prolific translator of German authors. In 2007, he received the Medal of Merit for service to the Republic. In 2009, he was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Award , presented by the Charter 77 Foundation. Kundera
58-460: A dialectical approach to such political stances by avant-garde artists and the avant-garde genre of art. Sociologically, as a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists, writers, architects, et al. produce artefacts — works of art, books, buildings — that intellectually and ideologically oppose the conformist value system of mainstream society. In the essay " Avant-Garde and Kitsch " (1939), Clement Greenberg said that
87-541: A post-modern time when the modernist ways of thought and action and the production of art have become redundant in a capitalist economy. Parting from the claims of Greenberg in the late 1930s and the insights of Poggioli in the early 1960s, in The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks (1983), the critic Harold Rosenberg said that since the middle of the 1960s the politically progressive avant-garde ceased being adversaries to artistic commercialism and
116-513: A stratum of the Intelligentsia that comprises novelists and writers, artists and architects et al. whose creative perspectives, ideas, and experimental artworks challenge the cultural values of contemporary bourgeois society . In the U.S. of the 1960s, the post–WWII changes to American culture and society allowed avant-garde artists to produce works of art that addressed the matters of the day, usually in political and sociologic opposition to
145-409: Is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created
174-525: Is another definition of "Avant-gardism" that distinguishes it from "modernism": Peter Bürger, for example, says avant-gardism rejects the "institution of art" and challenges social and artistic values, and so necessarily involves political, social, and cultural factors. According to the composer and musicologist Larry Sitsky , modernist composers from the early 20th century who do not qualify as avant-gardists include Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Igor Stravinsky; later modernist composers who do not fall into
203-633: Is facilitated by mechanically produced art-products of mediocre quality displacing art of quality workmanship; thus, the profitability of art-as-commodity determines its artistic value. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord said that the financial, commercial, and economic co-optation of the avant-garde into a commodity produced by neoliberal capitalism makes doubtful that avant-garde artists will remain culturally and intellectually relevant to their societies for preferring profit to cultural change and political progress. In The Theory-Death of
232-546: Is not reducible to a kitsch style or reactionary orientation, but can instead be used to refer to artists who engage with the legacy of the avant-garde while maintaining an awareness that doing so is in some sense anachronistic. The critic Charles Altieri argues that avant-garde and arrière-garde are interdependent: "where there is an avant-garde, there must be an arrière-garde ." Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of music working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. The term
261-661: Is remembered for Rodrigues' rotation formula for vectors, the Rodrigues formula for the Legendre polynomials , and the Euler–Rodrigues parameters . Rodrigues was born into a well-to-do Sephardi Jewish family in Bordeaux . His family was of Portuguese-Jewish descent. He was awarded a doctorate in mathematics on 28 June 1815 by the University of Paris . His dissertation contains
290-615: Is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether. By this definition, some avant-garde composers of the 20th century include Arnold Schoenberg , Richard Strauss (in his earliest work), Charles Ives , Igor Stravinsky , Anton Webern , Edgard Varèse , Alban Berg , George Antheil (in his earliest works only), Henry Cowell (in his earliest works), Harry Partch , John Cage , Iannis Xenakis , Morton Feldman , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Pauline Oliveros , Philip Glass , Meredith Monk , Laurie Anderson , and Diamanda Galás . There
319-618: The anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times. As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay "The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist" (1825), Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues 's political usage of vanguard identified the moral obligation of artists to "serve as [the] avant-garde" of
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#1733093616498348-588: The surrealist group Skupina RA (Group RA). His first book of poetry, Konstantina , was published in 1946. That same year he befriended the poet František Halas , whom he considered his teacher and mentor. From the mid-1950s he concentrated solely on writing and translating. From 1968 to 1970 he worked as a dramaturgist in the Mahen Theatre , a part of the National Theatre in Brno . Additionally, he collaborated with
377-527: The Avant-Garde ( Theorie der Avantgarde , 1974), the literary critic Peter Bürger looks at The Establishment 's embrace of socially critical works of art as capitalist co-optation of the artists and the genre of avant-garde art, because "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work [of art]". In Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2000), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh argues for
406-673: The Avant-Garde (1991), Paul Mann said that the avant-garde are economically integral to the contemporary institutions of the Establishment, specifically as part of the culture industry . Noting the conceptual shift, theoreticians, such as Matei Calinescu , in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), said that Western culture entered
435-708: The National Theatre as a playwright. In 2005, Mahen Theatre premiered his play about the Czech composer Leoš Janáček . During the period of normalization (in the 1970s and '80s) Kundera was banned from being published. He left the Mahen Theatre in reaction to the dismissal of his collaborators who openly expressed disagreement with the political transformation in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring . Because of that, he
464-458: The artistic vanguard oppose high culture and reject the artifice of mass culture , because the avant-garde functionally oppose the dumbing down of society — be it with low culture or with high culture . That in a capitalist society each medium of mass communication is a factory producing artworks, and is not a legitimate artistic medium; therefore, the products of mass culture are kitsch , simulations and simulacra of Art. Walter Benjamin in
493-477: The avant-garde traditions in both the United States and Europe. Among these are Fluxus , Happenings , and Neo-Dada . Brutalist architecture was greatly influenced by an avant-garde movement. Olinde Rodrigues Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues (6 October 1795 – 17 December 1851), more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues , was a French banker, mathematician , and social reformer . In mathematics Rodrigues
522-416: The category of avant-gardists include Elliott Carter , Milton Babbitt , György Ligeti , Witold Lutosławski , and Luciano Berio , since "their modernism was not conceived for the purpose of goading an audience." The 1960s saw a wave of free and avant-garde music in jazz genre, embodied by artists such as Ornette Coleman , Sun Ra , Albert Ayler , Archie Shepp , John Coltrane and Miles Davis . In
551-572: The cultural conformity inherent to popular culture and to consumerism as a way of life and as a worldview . In The Theory of the Avant-Garde ( Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia , 1962), the academic Renato Poggioli provides an early analysis of the avant-garde as art and as artistic movement. Surveying the historical and social, psychological and philosophical aspects of artistic vanguardism, Poggioli's examples of avant-garde art, poetry, and music, show that avant-garde artists share some values and ideals as contemporary bohemians . In Theory of
580-562: The early 20th centuries. In art history the socio-cultural functions of avant-garde art trace from Dada (1915–1920s) through the Situationist International (1957–1972) to the postmodernism of the American Language poets (1960s–1970s). The French military term avant-garde (advanced guard) identified a reconnaissance unit who scouted the terrain ahead of the main force of the army. In 19th-century French politics,
609-506: The essay " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (1939) and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) said that the artifice of mass culture voids the artistic value (the aura ) of a work of art. That the capitalist culture industry (publishing and music, radio and cinema, etc.) continually produces artificial culture for mass consumption, which
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#1733093616498638-535: The mediocrity of mass culture , which political disconnection transformed being an artist into "a profession, one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing [the profession of being an artist]." Avant-garde is frequently defined in contrast to arrière-garde , which in its original military sense refers to a rearguard force that protects the advance-guard. The term was less frequently used than "avant-garde" in 20th-century art criticism. The art historians Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris argue that arrière-garde
667-410: The people, because "the power of the arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way" to realise social, political, and economic reforms. In the realm of culture, the artistic experiments of the avant-garde push the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms , such as the disruptions of modernism in poetry, fiction, and drama, painting, music, and architecture, that occurred in the late 19th and in
696-471: The result now called Rodrigues' formula . After graduation, Rodrigues became a banker. A close associate of the Comte de Saint-Simon , Rodrigues continued, after Saint-Simon's death in 1825, to champion the older man's socialist ideals, a school of thought that came to be known as Saint-Simonianism . During this period, Rodrigues published writings on politics, social reform, and banking. In 1840, he published
725-593: The rock music of the 1970s, the "art" descriptor was generally understood to mean "aggressively avant-garde" or "pretentiously progressive". Post-punk artists from the late 1970s rejected traditional rock sensibilities in favor of an avant-garde aesthetic. Whereas the avant-garde has a significant history in 20th-century music, it is more pronounced in theatre and performance art, and often in conjunction with music and sound design innovations, as well as developments in visual media design. There are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to
754-454: The term avant-garde (vanguard) identified Left-wing political reformists who agitated for radical political change in French society. In the mid-19th century, as a cultural term, avant-garde identified a genre of art that advocated art-as-politics, art as an aesthetic and political means for realising social change in a society. Since the 20th century, the art term avant-garde identifies
783-713: Was a cousin of Czech-French writer Milan Kundera and nephew of the pianist and musicologist also named Ludvík Kundera . Kundera was born in Brno , Czechoslovakia He studied at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague and later continued his studies at Masaryk University in Brno. During World War II, he was abducted to a forced labour in Germany . After the war, he worked as an editor in several newspapers and magazines, including Blok , Rovnost and Host do domu . In 1945, he co-founded
812-510: Was devoted to the literature of German Romanticism . Kundera spent a large part of his life in the Moravian town of Kunštát . He died in Boskovice . Avant-garde In the arts and literature , the term avant-garde (from French meaning ' advance guard ' or ' vanguard ' ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art , and the artist who created it, which usually
841-627: Was labeled undesirable by the communist regime. In 1970 he was expelled from the Communist Party and gradually lost the possibility to continue his cultural activities in Czechoslovakia. To continue his work, he was forced to use pseudonyms . From the 1970s he was an initiator and coordinator of samizdat publishing activities in Czechoslovakia. He focused mainly on translations of German authors, such as Heinrich Böll , Berthold Brecht and Hans Arp . Additionally, he translated important expressionist and dadaist works. A significant part of his work
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