Must avant-garde art hold itself apart from the values and beliefs widely held in the common culture? Must advanced artists always be symbolic adversaries of the ordinary citizen?
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
In this collection of essays, British art historian Crow examines the relationship of avant-garde art to popular culture. Opening with an insightful examination of Manet's relationship to 19th-century Parisian mass culture, Crow segues into a scathingly apt portrayal of the alliance of certain members of the New York School with the commercial world of kitsch journalism. Exploring the relationship of pop art, conceptual art, and other modern movements to common culture, Crow questions the adversarial relationship that has arisen between art and the common citizen. He writes in a clear style and has a generally strong argument (though he is a bit strained in his discussion of Richard Serra's controversial "Tilted Arc" sculpture). Inquiring into what creates the distinction between "high" and "low" art in critical and popular conception, he envisions a symbiotic rather than a competitive relationship. Recommended for larger collections with an interest in modern and contemporary art.Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Inst. Lib., Washington, D.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
CHOICE Review
In this collection of his essays revised from earlier publications, Crow asserts that modern art owes much of its power to an intimate relationship to consumer culture. Emerging in the second half of the 19th century, modernism declared itself avant-garde and thus in opposition to dominant cultural as well as aesthetic practices. Crow (Univ. of Sussex) agrees with that assertion, but he shows how artists drew upon the very mass culture they decried. His evidence derives not just from his vast knowledge of 19th-century France but out of accounts of American artists, from Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollack to more recent practitioners of Conceptional art. Very much the critic himself, Crow chastises postmodern scholarship for failing to build on the insights of pioneer critics like Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro. Arguing that the practice of art (much of it recently influenced by contemporary critical theory itself, not the terms established by literary criticism) provides the strongest basis for assessing visual culture, Crow makes a strong case that art is rapidly becoming, in his words, "the most important venue in which demanding philosophical issues can be aired before a substantial lay public." Faculty. H. Gillette Jr. George Washington University
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BookPublisher: New Haven, CT ; London : Yale University Press, 1996Description: 274 p : ill(some col.) ; 22 cm. + hbk.ISBN: 0300064381 .Subject(s): Art, Modern -- 19th century