How to Be Avant-Garde
Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art
by Morgan Falconer
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Pub Date 18 Feb 2025 | Archive Date 31 Jan 2025
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Description
The strange story of the twentieth-century artists who sought to destroy art by transforming it into the substance of everyday life.
“Art has poisoned our life,” proclaimed De Stijl cofounder Theo van Doesburg. Reacting to the tumultuous crises of the twentieth century, especially the horrors of World War I, bands of writers and artists explored different ways to end art by having it become part of how they lived. In dynamic engagement with these revolutionary groups, Morgan Falconer starts with Futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose manifesto extolling speed, destruction, and modernity seeded avant-gardes across Europe. In turn, Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings sought to replace art with political cabaret, and the Surrealists tried to exchange it for tools to plumb the unconscious. Falconer next guides us through the Constructivists, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus, who explored how art could transmute into architecture and design. Finally, the Situationists swapped art for politics, with many of their ideas inspiring the 1968 Paris student protests. How to Be Avant-Garde brings forward these extraordinary radicals and their wild attempts to create utopia by destroying art.
Advance Praise
"A future classic along the lines of Lipstick Traces, one of those books that anyone hoping to bring true newness into the world will find and pass along like a shibboleth to others seeking the same." -Mark Braude, author of Kiki Man Ray
"Morgan Falconer is the pitch-perfect cheering but skeptical guide through the intricacies, infighting, backbiting, dead ends, crazy schemes, mad ideas, wild leaps, and triumphs of the avant-garde." -Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author of How to Be an Artist
"Chock full of engaging details and anecdotes, Morgan Falconer’s book takes us on a lively romp through many of the locales where twentieth-century vanguard figures sought to create a new relationship between art and life. How to be Avant-Garde should appeal both to those in search of a good read and to those intrigued by the vexing question of what it all meant." -Jerrold Seigel, author of Bohemian Paris and The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp
"What is art for? How to Be Avant-Garde examines what happened when the horrors of World War I made it clear that the traditional answer?that it’s for making rich people’s homes nicer?could no longer apply. Maybe art’s time was up? Maybe it should no longer exist at all? Why was art between the wars so vivid and interesting? Read How to Be Avant-Garde and find out.”" -Ruth Brandon, author of Spellbound by Marcel: Duchamp, Love, and Art
"How to Be Avant-Garde can take its place alongside such mainstays as Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years and Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New as a lively and thought-provoking survey of the twentieth century’s most impactful contribution to cultural life." -Mark Polizzotti, author of Why Surrealism Matters
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781324051428 |
| PRICE | US$32.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 272 |
