TOWARDS A NEWER LAOCOON
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indeed it had to originate in bourgeois society, could only come in
the guise of a denial of that society, as a turning away from it. It
was not to be an about-face towards a new society, but an emigra–
tion to a Bohemia which was to be art's sanctuary from capitalism.
It was to he the task of the avant-garde to perform in opposition to
bourgeois society the function of finding new and adequate cultural
forms for the expression of that same society, without at the same
time succumbing to its ideological divisions and its refusal to per–
mit the arts to be their own justification. The avant-garde, both
child and negation of Romanticism, becomes the embodiment of
art's instinct of self-preservation. It is interested in, and feels
itself responsible to, only the values of art; and, given society as
it is, has an organic sense of what is good and what is bad for art.
As the first and most important item upon its agenda,' the
avant-garde saw the necessity of an escape from ideas, which were
infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society. Ideas
came to mean subject matter in general. (Subject matter as distin–
guished from content: in the sense that every work of art must have
content, but that subject matter is something the artist does or does
not have in mind when he is actually at work.) This meant a new
and greater emphasis upon form, and it also involved the asser–
tion of the arts as independent vocations, disciplines and crafts,
absolutely autonomous, and entitled to respect for their own sakes,
and not merely as vessels of communication. It was the signal for
a revolt against the dominance of literature, which was subject
matter at its most oppressive.
The avant-garde has pursued, and still pursues, several vari–
ants, whose chronological order is by no means clear, but can be
best traced in painting, which as the chief victim of literature
brought the problem into sharpest focus. (Forces stemming from
outside art play a much larger part than I have room to acknowl–
edge here. And I must perforce be rather schematic and abstract,
since I am interested more in tracing large outlines than in account–
ing for and gathering in all particular manifestations.)
By the second third of the 19th century academic painting
had degenerated from the pictorial to the picturesque. Everything
depends on the anecdote or the message. The painted picture occurs
in blank, indeterminate space; it just happens to be on a square
of canvas and inside a frame. It might just as well have been
