ABSTRACT
Imagine Walter Benjamin in Berlin, the city of his childhood, walking through the international avant-garde exhibit Tendenzen der zwanziger Jahre, on display in 1977 in the new Nationalgalerie built by Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe in the 1960s. American critics especially tended to use the terms avant-garde and modernism interchangeably. For a moment in the 1960s it seemed the Phoenix avant-garde had risen from the ashes, fancying a flight toward the new frontier of the postmodern. The cultural paradox of the 1970s is not so much the side-by-side coexistence of a future-happy postmodernism with avant-garde museum retrospectives. Postmodernism reigned supreme, and a sense of novelty and cultural change was pervasive. The cultural paradox of the 1970s is not so much the side-by-side coexistence of a future-happy postmodernism with avant-garde museum retrospectives. Postmodernism has lost that capacity to gain shock value from difference, except perhaps in relation to forms of a very traditional aesthetic conservatism.
