ABSTRACT
Modern art is beginning to lose its powers of negation. The avant-garde hero/artist, the radical individualist, no matter how subversive, has long been one of the West's greatest idols and most valuable ideological commodities, both for domestic and export use. The avant-garde is first of all the instrument of an attack on tradition, but an attack mandated by tradition itself. The poets maintain an interest in both producing avant-garde art and in questioning the pomposities and contradictions of avant-gardism in general. Searching for a place between the rigors of radical art and fashions of radical chic, the New York School has offered an ironic or indifferent reappropriation of terms and characteristics of avant-gardism. The very idea of an avant-garde, of an art ahead of its time, rests on a progressive, linear, and teleological sense of history. Avant-garde artists risk rejection or ridicule, staking their efforts on a venture to bring reluctant masses into a necessary and improved future.
