The avant garde - tiriviailty no impediment , ineptitude no hindrance

At an avant garde exhibition the following was exhibited: a colour film of a naked man scrabbling about in a forest. Another showed a videotape of the 'artist' bowing solemnly to the camera. A third tacked up a scrap of paper that read, ‘Look in the mirror as I .....bleep bleep you..., the pain on your face is my freedom, your tears are the drops of my manhood,’ " Till eventually an angry woman tore it down. Another exhibit was a stack of bricks. 

The established justification for this sort of thing were the thoughts it supposedly provoked in the audience.

What was the most  interesting about such avant garde displays was  the small mostly unnoticed statement somewhere on the brochure of who is funding all this.

Historically the funding for the avant garde was as follows: it was believed in the West that a flourishing subsidised avant-garde served as cheap propaganda for the West.  Artists and intellectuals in Russia and Eastern Europe were shown that artists on this side of the wall were not only free to ignore official policy, but are actually paid to do anything they like.

 By now it is a commonplace that the avant garde is a pussy cat, long ago bourgeois culture learned to tolerate, even cherish, a tame avant-garde in its midst, but back then tolerance was written into the national budget.

In the pursuit of this policy, take the stack of bricks, triviality was no impediment, ineptitude no hindrance. The West presented itself as the artists’ paradise. So long as the Soviets were maintaining Socialist Realism

as their one approved style, the West continued to give its official blessing to minimalism, conceptualism, and any other diminution of art that its artists can devise.

The avant garde catalogue: gratuitous gestures, celebrations of chance, empty ‘concepts’, visions of anomie and helplessness without external cause were dutifully funded by some 'Director of Ceramics', or Assistant Professor of Embroidery who dutifully followed their brief to underscore their message: THERE IS FREEDOM IN THE WEST!

And the state didn't mind if subsidised artists issued manifestos claiming revolutionary virtue for their work, provided the work itself has none

The avant garde is now passe, it was avant, then it became entre, now it is derriere. There is of course the 'Unmade Bed' of Tracy Emin, and Damien Hirst's Sheep, a sort of hegemony of intimidation which continues,  but these are equally tame, driven by another force, the media's desperate desire  for sensation. For we are now apres the avant garde

The use of military metaphor the Avant Garde,’ signifies minds, not militant, but formed for discipline, that is, for conformity; minds born subservient, who can only think collectively.

Of course the counter argument goes, what about surrealism and other hisorical movements in Art?

And some might argue that this post is no more than the usual
 debunking analysis of intellectual opportunism pioneered by Pierre Bourdieu.

So there!