Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art - Hardcover

Kuspit, Donald

9780521452779: Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521452775 ISBN 13: 9780521452779

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2000

Donald Kuspit offers here an innovative psychoanalytic interpretation of avant-garde art, from its origins in the nineteenth century to its demise in the late-twentieth. Avant-garde art, the author argues, is a response to the conditions of modernity, particularly the crowd, which undermines and destroys the artist's sense of self. The avant-garde artist uses psychostrategies in order to restore his sense of self. These include a close identification with his medium, which becomes a 'signature substance' into which he escapes; making hallucinatory art in which he shows his own insanity, which becomes a way of escaping the pseudo-sanity of the crowd; or trying to transcend the crowd altogether by escaping into a world of abstraction, which functions in a religious way to afford an 'oceanic experience'. Drawing on numerous examples of avant-garde art, Kuspit makes extensive use of psychoanalysis, largely from British object-relational theory, to underline and elaborate his ideas. An extensive reinterpretation of Manet, officially the first avant-garde artist, and in whom all the various psychostrategies exist in seminal form, forms a keynote to this study.

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Review:

"Kuspit's new book...brings an unparalleled intellectual courage and interdisciplinary erudition to the examination of the psychomoral core of the initial flowering of the historical avant-garde....[it] must be seen as a treasure-trove of informed insight..." New Art Examiner

Book Description:

Donald Kuspit offers here a radical new interpretation of avant-garde art based on a psychological understanding of it. Avant-garde art, Kuspit suggests, is a response to the modern crowd, which destroys the sense of self. An extensive reinterpretation of Manet, the officially first avant-garde artist, keynotes the book.

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