Reluctant modernity : the institution of art and its historical forms
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Reluctant modernity : the institution of art and its historical forms
（Postmodern social futures）
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998
- : cloth
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 189-198) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this book, Ales Debeljak offers a refreshing alternative to postmodernists such as Baudrillard, who declare the death of art conceived as yet another source of rootless, circulating fictions. Inspired by the melancholy critical theory of Adorno and Benjamin, and drawing on Weber, Debeljak shows that with the dawning of modernity, art was made autonomous. Art production was effectively emancipated from the exigencies of everyday life and its guiding ideal of purposive rationality. The Renaissance brought on the first stage in a long, gradual withdrawal of art from the hitherto dominant mythological, religious, and aristocratic legitimization. Yet it was not until the 18th century that art assumed the separate status of a commodity to be bought and sold. However, art paid a price for its autonomy; through commodification art production ultimately become an extension of capitalist logic and control. The deterioration of bourgeois liberal individualism into the narcissism of mass society accompanied the decomposition of art into simplified mass art and commercialized kitsch. Maintaining its formal autonomy (museums, galleries, etc.), its content became the universal object of indirect corporate exploitation. Today postmodern art, argues Debeljak, is subjected to infinite reproducibility, total integration into mass society, and political resignation-no longer representing an alternative reality. The postmodern institution of art thus cannot be simply cured of modern structures and assumptions, but is, instead, fated to a continuous and painful relationship with modernity.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Preface Chapter 3 Acknowledgements Chapter 4 Introduction Chapter 5 Framing the Logic of Modernity Chapter 6 The Bourgeois Public Sphere in Modernity Chapter 7 The Institution of Art in Modernity Chapter 8 The Dissolution of the Bourgeois Public Sphere Chapter 9 The Institution of Art in Postmodernity Chapter 10 References Chapter 11 Index
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