Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art

"Donald Kuspit offers here a 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 avantgarde 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; the making of hallucinatory art in which he shows his own insanity, which becomes a way of escaping the pseudo-sanity of the crowd; or the attempt 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."--Jacket.