Michael Landy, Scrapheap Services, 1995
© Michael Landy

	Studydays Homepage
Concept of the Avant-Garde
	Concepts of the Avant-Garde Homepage
	Session 1: Theories of the Avant-Garde
	Session 2: USSR in Construction
	Session 3: Dada to Surrealism: Continuity and Difference
	Session 4: Conceptual Art and the Neo Avant-Garde
	Session 5: The Avant-Garde and its Publics
	Session 6: Contemporary Art and the Avant-Garde

Session 6: Contemporary Art and the Avant-Garde

There seems to be a great distance between the contemporary art scene and the avant-garde as traditionally conceived. Avant-garde art was thought of as difficult, having a limited market and only achieving success (if at all) after a long period of time. Much contemporary art is easy on the eye and mind, highly marketable and quickly successful. Yet in the popular imagination, it is still thought of as avant-garde. Julian Stallabrass’s talk analyses the causes for that persistent misperception, looking at a range of prominent art globally.

Webcast of Session 6 (Real Media stream)

Speaker: Julian Stallabrass , Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Suggested Further Reading

• Coco Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings, inIVA/ Routledge, London 2001.
• Eric Hobsbawm, Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes, Thames and Hudson, London 1998.
• Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, Verso, London 1999.
• Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, Verso, London 2001.



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